Doh Eain (“Our Home”) is a social enterprise aimed at citizen-led heritage conservation and urban regeneration in Yangon. The organization is known for its work on preserving historical residential buildings but recently they took a step further to help re-energize public space downtown.
Downtown Yangon has considerable amount of land parcel that could be turned into public, useful and active spaces for the community. The life of a city stands not only on the built up spaces, but more importantly on the open spaces. We could call them empty but in reality they are full of trash and dirty.
Doh Eain's most recent project aims to re-open a couple of alleyways in a way that responds to the community's needs and wishes. Hla Day teamed up with Doh Eain to create some beauty in their newest allyway project. Being Hla Day, we love creating beauty while also spreading awareness of waste, reuse, recycle and upcycle.
As the community requested outdoor furniture, Hla Day suggested a canopy to shade the different sitting areas: a garden shade. The proposal was to build a canopy full of flowers and leaves cut out of laminated plastic sheets supplied by our partners Chu Chu and STP. These were sandwiched waste plastic bags which made the perfect material to create our shade. The flowers and leaves were threaded onto a fishing net, which hung and danced depending on the wind. Every single flower and leaf was hand drawn and cut by the children who joined in this community activity. Their favourite colour was gold.
We also proposed a vertical garden made with waste plastic bottles. These are aligned to hang vertically in the alleyway walls, and planted with flowers, plants or herbs. The aim was not only to make these alleyways beautiful but also to create a sense of ownership from the community. A place that they all are related to, and are keen to maintain and keep beautiful. One hopes that this garden will encourage more such activities by the community in the alleyway.
The workshops brought not only the community together but also brought out their artistic side. Everyone had the chance to create a flower or leaf, or to plant the seeds for a beautiful plant to grow in their alleyway, contributing to a community installation.
Doh Eain and Hla Day hope to build awareness and encourage rethinking about waste and the future of the planet. Myanmar, like many parts of the world, is facing many development challenges, including a sad increase of waste. Recycling can be part of the solution, but the most effective way is to reduce the amount of plastic that we create in the first place.
This job wouldn’t have been possible without all our partners, and the community which plays the biggest role now and in the future. We can’t wait to see all the flowers and the new herbs put up!
