AL-JANNAH: An Oasis Settlement Where Permaculture Rebuilds Livelihoods for Afghan Widows

Most housing proposals for displaced or vulnerable communities stop at the front door: a roof, a room, a number on a list. AL-JANNAH starts from a harder question. What does a woman who has lost her husband, and with him her household's income, actually need to rebuild a life? The answer here is a settlement where housing, education, vocational training, commerce, worship, agriculture and recreation share one landscape. Permaculture organises it, and a large pond sits at its centre.

Designed by Sukrit Marwaha and Rashi Desadla, AL-JANNAH was a Shortlisted entry in Resile. The proposal is a center for widows and their families in Afghanistan. Its name draws on Jannah, or paradise, and the designers express that idea spatially as an oasis. They frame the oasis as a working image of hope, stability and collective strength, and they mean it to function, not to decorate.

An Oasis Plan Where Farms Sit Between the Houses

The aerial view gives the clearest reading of the strategy. Low white houses topped with solar panels ring a circular pond, and palm groves fill the gaps between them. The plan does not lay a rigid grid over the terrain. It follows the land: tree cover stays on the higher ground to provide shade and hold water, major structures sit clear of natural drainage paths, and swales run along the contours to slow and collect runoff. Grazing areas and farms stay inside the settlement instead of being pushed to its edge, so food production becomes part of the daily walk home.

This is the project's most important move. Permaculture is often used as a planting palette added at the end. Here it shapes the site plan from the start, governing where buildings go, how water moves, where livestock graze and how energy is generated. Architecture is one layer of a larger ecological infrastructure, and the drawing is honest about that ranking.

Lattice Gateways and a Shared Hall for Trade

At ground level, the entrance facade turns on a single large arched opening filled with a golden lattice screen. Palm shadows fall across the paved forecourt as people cross it. The lattice filters light and view, which offers a measure of privacy and shade without closing the building off. For a community of women and children, that calibrated openness is a sensible choice.

Inside, a double-height hall pairs perforated wall panels with a stepped seating stair, a balcony railing and small shop stalls. The stair works as both circulation and gathering space, so the hall can host trade and informal assembly at once. This overlap is what the designers mean when they say living, learning, working and trading should not be divided into disconnected institutional boxes.

Water as Schoolyard, Microclimate and Commons

The arcaded school building is seen across the pond, with rocks, ducks and palms in the foreground. The view makes the water's several jobs plain. The central pond is meant to temper the microclimate, recall the oasis landscapes of the region and anchor pathways and planted edges for walking, meeting and recreation. It is environmental infrastructure and public space at the same time.

Water management does not stop at the pond's edge. Contour swales capture runoff and support soil moisture, smaller ponds extend the system across the site, and dense vegetation helps retain water. Placing classrooms beside this network gives children a daily, physical lesson in how their settlement sustains itself.

The Souq as a Shaded Arcade

The covered arcade of white pointed arches, lined with clothing stalls and set over a patterned tile floor, draws directly on the souq as a typology. The arches give continuous shade and a steady rhythm along the route, and families move through it at an unhurried pace. For widows seeking economic independence, a dignified, sheltered place to sell their goods matters as much as the training that produces those goods. The souq closes the loop between skill and income.

Training Rooms and Homes Organised Around Courtyards

The two-storey training center carries the same vocabulary of arcades, lattice screens and exposed stairs, and it is viewed past the pond with people seated on a bench. Keeping the stairs on the outside turns movement between levels into a visible social act. Keeping the building close to the water ties vocational learning to the settlement's shared heart, not to a back lot.

The residential courtyard building brings the scale down. Two storeys of white walls frame timber pergola balconies, arched openings and a central stair passage under a lattice roof, with palms and a gravel path at its base. The courtyard gives households a protected outdoor room. The pergolas and lattice repeat the filtering logic of the public buildings at a domestic scale, which gives the whole settlement a consistent language of shade.

Why This Project Matters

AL-JANNAH treats recovery as a systems problem. The designers combine housing with schools, a souq, training spaces, farms, grazing land and a managed water landscape. In doing so they argue that self-sufficiency is built from many connected parts, and that a home without a livelihood or a community around it is only half a solution. Making permaculture the organising principle, not a finishing layer, is what gives the argument its weight.

The oasis metaphor could easily have become a sentimental flourish. Instead the designers made it operational: the pond cools, collects, gathers and orients. For a competition about resilience, that is the right instinct, because a symbol carries real meaning for a struggling community only when it also does work.

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Project credits: AL-JANNAH Resile (uni.xyz).