ABSTRACT
In 2014, Cardiff Council launched Stepping Up as guidelines for Community Asset Transfer (CATs) whereby civic assets are transferred on long-term leaseholds to communities. Citing austerity budgets as creating unprecedented pressures on local councils to deliver local services and maintain civic infrastructure, the guidelines outlined opportunities for communities to ‘Step up’ and take control over the development of their own areas.
The process of taking control of civic infrastructure raises multiple challenges for community groups who form in response to such opportunities. From gathering teams of community members, partner organisations and professional support to build the capacity and resources to undertake a CAT, to longer term challenges of planning for generational timescales and aligning with local and national civic infrastructures, CATs may offer opportunity but ask much of all who get involved.
This chapter maps the generosities gifted, and demanded, in the first three years of a Community Asset Transfer of a Bowls Pavilion in Grangetown, Cardiff, locating this CAT within changing relationships between local and national government and communities under a decade of austerity economics in the UK giving way to a current Welsh policy landscape of social value.
