Empowerment and Healing Farms: Turning Kandahar Courtyards into Ground for Work, Learning and Recovery

Most recovery architecture starts with the institution: a shelter, a clinic, a building with a name over the door. Empowerment and Healing Farms starts with the oldest productive landscape there is, the farm, and asks it to carry far more than crops. Here, cultivated land becomes a framework for safety, livelihood, education and long-term independence. Agriculture is treated as social infrastructure, a daily routine through which residents can work, learn, meet one another and rebuild confidence.

Designed for widows and their children in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the proposal was developed by Mojtaba Hooshangianshirazi, Mahsa Pakshir, Sina Karamirad and Hilda Khozaee, and was recognised as the Runner-up entry of Resile. Rather than an isolated facility, the team proposes a compact urban settlement where housing, agriculture, education, health, culture and employment are woven together, drawing on and responding to the existing urban conditions of Zanabad.

A Courtyard Planted as a Classroom

The opening rendering sets the project's tone with unusual restraint. Women in blue headscarves bend to work a grass courtyard, a single path runs through the middle, and arched, terraced buildings rise behind. Nothing here reads as rehabilitation in the clinical sense. The courtyard is simply a place of work, and that is the point: the designers want shared activity, not institutional care, to define daily life.

The team describes the farm as a teacher, one that instructs through soil, sunlight, water and seasons. Planting, maintaining and harvesting demand patience and continuity, and in this context those habits become a quiet metaphor for rebuilding a future one step at a time. Crucially, cultivation is also tied to income: residents can acquire agricultural knowledge and potentially sell what they grow, linking work to autonomy rather than dependency.

From Scattered Clusters to a Connected Settlement

The presentation board shows how the proposal reorganises Zanabad's housing logic. An axonometric of stepped, green-roofed houses sits beside unit type diagrams and a site plan of courtyard clusters. The drawings trace a shift from disconnected residential units toward an interconnected structure of homes, courtyards, agricultural plots, neighbourhood centres and pedestrian alleys.

What stands out is the decision to distribute social life rather than concentrate it in a single civic building. A courtyard becomes a meeting space, an alley a social connector, a rooftop productive land, a workshop an economic resource, a school part of everyday neighbourhood life. Treating social interaction as an urban design problem is the project's sharpest move, because it means support is encountered on the way to somewhere else, not only when someone goes looking for it.

Rooftop Gardens and Wind Catchers on the Skyline

Seen from above, the settlement becomes a field of green rooftop gardens linked by exterior stairs, with tall wind catcher towers punctuating a hazy, pale cluster of courtyards. The roofs are not leftover surfaces; they extend the farm vertically, giving a compact plan more cultivable ground without spreading the footprint.

The sketch-style view at dusk brings the scale back down to the body: arched windows, an exterior stair, slender trees and wind catchers against a blue sky. The stair matters here. By placing circulation on the outside of buildings, the design lets movement between dwelling, roof and courtyard double as moments of visibility and encounter, which supports the settlement's broader ambition of continuous, low-key social contact.

Reading the Courtyard as a Climate Device

The environmental diagram labels radiation, evaporation, albedo, heat flux and shadows acting across rooftops and facades around a grass-covered courtyard. It frames planting as more than a livelihood strategy: vegetation and enclosure are treated as tools for moderating a harsh climate, with the courtyard working alongside green roofs and wind catchers as part of a passive system.

This is where the project's claim to sustainable architecture becomes concrete. The same grass that produces food and gathers neighbours is also asked to shape comfort, so ecological performance and social programme are not separate layers but overlapping functions of the same ground.

Timed Routes for Women and Children

The final axonometric is perhaps the most telling drawing in the set. A courtyard housing cluster is overlaid with timing icons and routes for women and children, drawn above a concrete stair and arched windows. Rather than presenting the plan as a static object, the team maps how it would be used through a day, acknowledging that safety for this population depends on when and how people move, not just where walls are placed.

Designing around daily routines and specific users grounds the proposal's larger ideas. The farm, the school and the workshop only become empowering if they can be reached comfortably and safely, and this diagram shows the designers thinking through that access at the scale of the path and the hour.

Why This Project Matters

Empowerment and Healing Farms resists the temptation to design recovery as an enclosure. Its argument is that physical security and economic independence can be built from the same everyday elements: a courtyard, a rooftop, an alley, a workshop. By folding agriculture into housing at every scale, the team turns productive land into the connective tissue of a community rather than a programme tacked onto its edge.

For a competition centred on resilience, that is a meaningful reframing. The project suggests that rebuilding a life is incremental, seasonal and shared, and that architecture can support this best by creating many small opportunities for work and contact instead of one grand gesture. It is a proposal that takes both its users and its climate seriously, and that combination is what makes it worth studying.

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Project credits: Empowerment and Healing Farms Resile (uni.xyz).