Kushaaneh: A Resilience Centre in Kandahar Built on Women's Freedom to Choose

Most resilience projects ask how a building survives: the flood, the quake, the heat. Kushaaneh, a girl who strives asks a harder question, which is how a person survives with her agency intact. The answer it proposes is disarmingly simple. Give women the right to choose their home, their work and their neighbours, and let the architecture follow those choices rather than dictate them.

Conceived as a Resilience Centre in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the proposal was designed by dharmik thakkar, Arun Biswanath, Manan Jain and Saurav Bisht, and was recognized as a Shortlisted entry in the Resile competition. Working with modular housing, earth and timber construction, productive landscapes, shared infrastructure and participatory planning, the team treats sustainability as a social contract as much as an environmental one. The full entry is available on uni.xyz.

A Courtyard Where Decisions Become Plans

This isometric reads less like a finished design than a record of choices. Clay-toned houses gather around a shared courtyard, blue arched windows punctuate the earthen walls, and arrows trace how residents move through the cluster and up the stair to the terraces. The diagram makes the project's central claim visible: that circulation, adjacency and threshold are not fixed by the architect but negotiated by the people who live there.

For communities shaped by displacement, exclusion and post-war instability, that shift carries real weight. The designers describe co-creation as a way to build confidence and belonging, and the drawing supports the point. Rather than prescribing a single model of rehabilitation, the scheme offers a framework that women and their families fill in, so the settlement becomes a reflection of individual decisions held within a collective order.

Earth, Wood and Shade Drawn From Kandahar

Pulled back to an aerial view, the settlement settles lightly into dry grassland, with small figures and animals moving between houses and courtyards. What stands out is the refusal of an imported aesthetic. Earth and wood form the primary palette, and the vocabulary of thick walls, shaded openings, courtyards, arcades, verandahs, terraces and overhangs is drawn directly from regional building practice and its response to a harsh climate.

This is where the project's sustainability argument is most convincing. Local materials reduce reliance on resource-intensive construction, but they also deliver something a carbon calculation cannot: familiarity. A woman rebuilding her life is more likely to claim a house that looks and behaves like home. Kushaaneh grows out of Kandahar's architectural language instead of landing on top of it.

A Public Square Framed by the Arcade

If the courtyards are where private choices take shape, this crowded open square is where they meet. A red arcaded building lines one edge, clay house clusters frame the others, and the space fills with people. The arcade does important work here: it gives the communal realm a shaded, legible edge and signals a shift in scale from the inward-looking neighbourhood to the shared life of the settlement.

The drawing positions communal infrastructure as the counterweight to individual freedom. Choice without a collective frame can fragment a community; this square offers the common ground where resilience becomes a shared responsibility rather than a solitary burden.

Micro-Clusters That Repeat Without Repeating

The project's most rigorous sheet pairs stacked clay house groups with white massing diagrams that strip each cluster to its logic. Each micro-cluster is a small inward-looking neighbourhood built from modular blocks, and the diagrams show those blocks shifting, rotating, stacking and wrapping around shared courtyards in numerous configurations.

This is how the scheme avoids the trap of most modular housing. The module guarantees buildability and a recognizable architectural system, while the freedom of arrangement guarantees that no two clusters need feel alike. Repetition here produces variety, and each group can develop its own spatial identity according to the requirements and preferences of its residents. The carts scattered across the sheet are a quiet reminder that these courtyards are meant to be worked in, not just looked at.

Streets of Arches, Lattices and Terraces

The rendered street scenes bring the system down to eye level. Red arched facades, lattice screens and stepped terraces line streets planted with palms, and veiled figures move through layered thresholds between inside and out. The lattice and the arcade both mediate light and visibility, filtering the street while keeping it connected to the houses behind.

These views matter because they test the idea at the scale where it will be lived. The board shows that the vernacular elements are not decoration: the arches, screens and terraces create shaded transitions that make outdoor life possible in the Kandahar climate, and give women a graded sequence of spaces to move through on their own terms.

Why This Project Matters

Kushaaneh widens the definition of resilience beyond materials and structure to include personal agency, social belonging and collective responsibility. Its strongest move is to make choice an architectural principle, built into the module, the cluster and the courtyard, rather than a sentiment attached to the brief. The result is a settlement that can evolve with its residents instead of freezing them into a designer's assumptions.

It also shows that participatory design and vernacular construction can reinforce each other. A familiar palette of earth and wood lowers the barrier to ownership, and a flexible modular system turns that ownership into spatial form. For a context as fragile as post-war Kandahar, the proposal makes a persuasive case that the most durable thing architecture can build is a woman's confidence in her own decisions.

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Project credits: Kushaaneh, a girl who strives Resile (uni.xyz).