Welcome to our blog. Read on to learn more of Tir Pontypridd’s principles on land from our founding member and current Chair Ken Moon.
Croeso i’n blog. Darllenwch mwy am ein egwyddorion a’n diddordeb yn ymwneud â thir gan ein Cadeirydd Ken Moon.
One of the reasons we’re setting up Tir Pontypridd is to protect the areas of open space around our town. Spaces we value for health and well-being and which are important for biodiversity too. We think of this as Y Ffridd.
These are areas which have traditionally been considered too close to town for grazing, or too challenging for building on. Yet they may have been accessed by local communities for a variety of purposes for decades.
And so we tend to think of these spaces as open access, as a public commons. But they’re often publicly or privately owned, and as circumstances change we can suddenly find that their owners have other ideas for them.
Kilvey Hill on the outskirts of Swansea is an interesting example. It’s been a public open space for as long as anyone can remember and is used by a wide range of people for a wide variety of purposes.
But because it is not community owned, and the decision making processes about how it can best be used sit outside the local community it is now under threat from a development which is not community led.
There are many places like this in and around our communities. There are many places like this which have been lost to our communities. And the key decisions about their future are taken outside our communities.
Tir Pontypridd aims to secure land in and around Pontypridd for Community Use. We may not know what the future holds for our local Ffridd, but we do know that our communities are key to their sustainability.