The Qala Community: Reworking Afghanistan's Fortified Courtyard Settlement as a Women-Led Refuge

Most resilience projects begin with a shelter. The Qala Community begins with a wall, then asks what a wall is for. Its answer is unusually complete: a protected settlement where housing, education, healthcare, craft production, agriculture, worship and economic infrastructure share one urban framework, and where architecture works as an instrument of security, independence and cultural continuity for the women who live inside it.

Designed by Karl Huby and Sundas Rohilla, the proposal took the Winner title in Resile. It is sited for the widows of Zanabad, near Qandahar in Afghanistan, and it reads sustainability broadly. Environmental performance matters, but so does preserving knowledge, creating livelihoods, supporting children and keeping future generations connected to their cultural landscape. That wider definition is what gives the scheme its weight.

The Qala as a Framework, Not a Fortress

The project's starting point is the Qala, the traditional fortified settlement of the region, defined by enclosure, thick walls, courtyards and an inward-looking communal life. Huby and Rohilla do not reproduce it literally. They extract its spatial principles and recalibrate them for a contemporary social brief, so that the perimeter becomes the organising idea of a whole neighbourhood rather than a defensive shell around a single compound.

The key move is to let buildings form the boundary themselves, supported by walls and controlled entrances, rather than relying on a freestanding barrier. Behind that edge sits a dense network of courtyards, homes, gardens, workshops, classrooms, streets and productive landscape. The tension between enclosure and openness is the project's central architectural idea, and the designers handle it with restraint: the edge is firm, but what it protects is varied and active.

Safety Written Into the Street Pattern

The masterplan is structured around six interconnected principles, and the first, A Safe Refuge, sets the tone. Security here is not a technical add-on of fences and checkpoints. Controlled access, built edges, internal streets, courtyards and planting work together to create layered privacy and natural surveillance, so safety is a property of the urban form itself.

The practical consequence is significant for its residents. A woman can move between home, school, workshop, garden, community facility and place of worship without ever leaving protected ground. The designers are careful to avoid the institutional feel that often accompanies secure housing, and the decision to distribute protection across many small spatial gestures, rather than concentrating it at one hard line, is what makes that possible.

Construction as a Shared Skill

The second principle, Built by Women, shifts the project from design to process. The settlement relies on traditional and familiar construction techniques precisely so that residents can take part in building it. Construction becomes a route to skill development, knowledge transfer and collective ownership, not a service delivered by outsiders.

This is the scheme's most consequential idea. The community is not presented as a finished object handed over to its occupants; it is a framework that continues to grow through them. For a population whose independence is precarious, the ability to extend, repair and adapt one's own environment is a form of resilience that no material specification can supply on its own.

Courtyards That Carry the Daily Life of the Settlement

The third principle, A Courtyard Community, gives the plan its social core. Instead of separating domestic and communal programmes into isolated buildings, housing clusters gather around shared outdoor rooms. These spaces absorb a wide range of everyday activity: conversation, teaching, cooking, children's play, gardening, rest and informal gathering.

What stands out is the hierarchy, or rather the refusal of one. The courtyard receives the same design attention as interior space, which is consistent with the Qala tradition the project draws on and well suited to the climate around Qandahar. It also means the most valuable rooms in the settlement are collective ones, a quiet but deliberate statement about how this community is meant to function.

Why This Project Matters

Humanitarian housing proposals often treat vulnerable populations as recipients. The Qala Community treats the widows of Zanabad as builders, teachers, producers and stewards of a settlement that belongs to them. By grounding that ambition in a typology the region already understands, the designers avoid the imported, placeless quality that undermines many well-intentioned schemes.

Its broader lesson is about where resilience lives. Here it sits in a perimeter made of buildings, in streets that watch over themselves, in courtyards that double as classrooms and kitchens, and in construction methods residents can master. Huby and Rohilla show that a protective architecture does not have to be a closed one, and that heritage can be a working tool for the future rather than a backdrop to it.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Karl Huby, Sundas Rohilla

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Project credits: The Qala Community by Karl Huby, Sundas Rohilla Resile (uni.xyz).