AREMCW: A Walled Neighbourhood Near Kandahar Built Around Music, Learning and Women's Safety

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This article was written by UNI Editorial and published on uni.xyz, a platform for design professionals and creative thinkers.

Q: What is "AREMCW: A Walled Neighbourhood Near Kandahar Built Around Music, Learning and Women's Safety" about?

This article covers topics related to Urban Design, Urban Planning, Cultural Preservation. Claudia Petre reads Kandahar's old town of courtyards and graded streets to shelter education, enterprise and music for Afghan women and their families.

Most resilience projects begin with a shelter. AREMCW begins with a street. The Afghan Resilience, Education and Music Centre for Women treats safety as a property of urban form rather than a fence around a building: a sequence of arcades, squares and courtyards that lets public life happen while keeping the most vulnerable residents deep inside the plan. Housing, schooling, employment, healthcare and cultural preservation share one protected neighbourhood, and music sits at its centre as the thread connecting Afghanistan to the wider world.

Designed by Claudia Petre and recognised as an Editor's Choice entry in the Resile competition, the proposal responds to the social and cultural damage left by prolonged conflict in Afghanistan. The site lies near Kandahar, close to the Arghandab River in one of the region's fertile agricultural belts, and keeps a deliberate link to the city's historic trade centre. That combination of arable land and commercial adjacency underpins the project's larger ambition: a partially self-sufficient settlement where women build skills, children learn and play safely, and families work toward independent lives.

An Arcaded Street That Sets the Tone Before Any Building Does

Collage perspective of a pedestrian street lined with arcaded walls, palms and potted plants, with rose petal sellers and children under a night sky and full mo

The opening collage puts the viewer on a pedestrian street at night, with arcaded walls, palms and potted plants framing rose petal sellers and children under a full moon. It is a telling choice of first image. Petre leads with commerce and play rather than with classrooms or dormitories, signalling that the community is meant to feel like part of a city, not an institution. The arcade does double duty: it shades and enlivens the street edge while keeping thresholds legible, so that what lies behind the wall remains private by default.

A Master Plan That Reveals Itself in Layers

Axonometric drawing of a walled site with clustered housing blocks, a central mosque-like volume and rows of palm trees around the edge

The axonometric shows the strategy whole: a walled site ringed with rows of palms, clustered housing blocks, and a central mosque-like volume anchoring the composition. Instead of importing an unfamiliar planning model, Petre studied Kandahar's old town and its hierarchy of streets, internal squares and neighbourhood clusters. Public green areas and major institutions occupy the outer edges; commercial and cultural facilities draw closer to the civic core; dwelling clusters and individual homes sit in the most protected zones.

The result is a plan that never shows every function at once. Visitors move from public ground toward increasingly private territory, and that gradient is the security system. At the heart of it, a large community square gathers education, commerce, worship, music and housing around one shared space, where children can play near the schools, women can attend workshops, and local goods can change hands. Protection here comes from depth and sequence, which allows the settlement to stay connected to the surrounding city rather than sealed off from it.

Courtyards Cut Around a Single Palm

Rendered narrow courtyard between pink brick walls with a tall date palm, patterned tile paving and a woman walking past in daylight

Section drawing of a three-storey brick house cut open around a central palm, showing rooms, families and a child at play on the street

The courtyard render narrows the scale: pink brick walls, patterned tile paving, a tall date palm and a woman walking through in daylight. The section beside it explains how that calm is constructed. A three-storey brick house wraps a central palm, with rooms stacked around the void and a child playing on the street outside. The drawing makes the relationship between inside and outside explicit: the street remains lively and visible, while family life turns inward toward light, shade and planting.

This is the old town's protected courtyard reinterpreted for women and families, and it is the project's most persuasive move. The palm is not ornament; it is the organising centre of the dwelling, a reminder of the agricultural landscape along the Arghandab and a source of shade within a dense brick fabric.

Domestic Rituals Drawn at the Scale of a Meal

Two axonometric drawings, one of a family sharing a meal on floor cushions in a vaulted room, the other a palm courtyard with a bath

Elevation drawing of two facades with arched ground-floor openings, colorful shuttered windows and brown roof edges under a crescent moon at night

Two axonometrics zoom further in: a family sharing a meal on floor cushions inside a vaulted room, and a palm courtyard with a bath. Drawing furniture at the level of cushions and bathing water shows that Petre is designing for habits, not just floor area. The elevation that follows turns outward again, with arched ground-floor openings, colourful shuttered windows and brown roof edges under a crescent moon. The arches echo the arcaded street, while the shutters give each household control over how much of the interior it shares with the public realm.

Read together, these drawings describe a home that is enclosed without being closed. Thick walls and shutters regulate privacy, and courtyards bring daylight and greenery into rooms that would otherwise face hard street edges.

A Programme That Extends Beyond the Classroom

AREMCW is conceived as a small, integrated neighbourhood rather than a school with housing attached. The educational centre combines classrooms for children with training spaces for women, offering practical skills, digital subjects and foreign languages intended to support economic independence and open access to wider professional and cultural networks, with international volunteers contributing to selected learning. Around it, workshops let artisans pass on traditional knowledge, and proximity to farmland supports food production and local enterprise.

Music anchors the whole programme as a cultural core and a meeting point between Afghanistan and the world beyond it. Placing it within the civic heart, alongside worship, trade and learning, makes cultural preservation an everyday activity rather than a museum function.

Why This Project Matters

Resilience projects often default to the language of emergency: modular units, rapid deployment, neutral grids. AREMCW argues that recovery from conflict is better served by familiar urban patterns. By borrowing the spatial hierarchy of Kandahar's old town, with its graded streets, internal squares and inward-facing courtyards, Petre gives women and families a place that reads as their own city rather than a camp, and builds security out of sequence and depth instead of barriers.

The proposal also refuses to separate the social programme from the architecture. Classrooms, workshops, homes, farmland and a music centre are organised around one shared square, so that learning, earning and cultural life reinforce each other daily. For a competition about resilience, that is the right lesson: durable communities are built from overlapping uses and inherited forms, and the plan itself can be an instrument of confidence.