Time, Place, Memory: Reading Kandahar's Urban Fabric to Build a Community for Widows of War

Most housing proposals for displaced or vulnerable groups begin with the dwelling and work outward. Time, Place, Memory reverses that order. Before drawing a single home, its designers studied how Kandahar itself is organised, from the dense historic core to the regular plots of its newer districts. They then used that reading to plan an entire settlement for widows of war, where housing, schooling, healthcare, agriculture, worship, culture and recreation sit within one coherent urban structure. The project argues that resilience is less about shelter than about a neighbourhood that can carry everyday life, security and collective identity.

The proposal was developed by Riccardo Renzi, Elena Ceccarelli, Diego Betti, Virginia Vivona and Francesca Cantale, and was shortlisted in the Resile competition. Sited near Kandahar, it positions itself as a contemporary interpretation of the city's spatial structure rather than a generic model dropped onto the landscape, and that ambition shapes every scale of the work.

A Settlement Drawn from Kandahar's Own Grain

The exposed two-storey concrete frame, with its open bays, steel railings and exterior stair set against a dust-coloured sky, reads as the built outcome of a long analytical process. The team studied five distinct conditions in Kandahar independently: the historic centre, compact urban blocks, residential neighbourhoods, sprawl and new planned developments. The centre showed narrow routes, irregular subdivisions and internal courtyards; the periphery showed regular streets, larger plots and repetition. Rather than choosing one condition as a template, the designers placed proportional grids and geometric constructions over all of them to find recurring alignments between buildings, streets, plots and open space.

That move turns observation into a generative tool. The resulting settlement is more ordered than the old city, built from repeated housing groups arranged along a hierarchy of streets, yet it keeps the compact clusters and layered circulation found in Kandahar's residential fabric. The frame in this image carries that logic: a clear, repeatable structure that can absorb variation without losing legibility.

Courtyards That Translate the City Block into Domestic Space

The courtyard is where the urban analysis becomes something a resident can feel. In the first view, a white-framed glass wall opens onto a gravel court enclosed by board-marked concrete, under a corrugated metal ceiling. In the second, four rectangular reflecting pools sit in front of a timber-slatted screen inside concrete walls. Both spaces are defined by enclosure first and openness second, which is exactly the relationship the designers extracted from Kandahar's dense blocks.

The project is explicit that it does not reproduce the historic city literally. Instead it keeps the principles of enclosure, courtyards and graduated privacy while giving them the clarity and accessibility a new community needs. For a settlement housing widows of war, those graded thresholds matter: the timber screen and the solid concrete walls let the court be shared and protected at the same time.

Light from Above, Privacy at the Edge

The interior with oval skylights cut into a coffered concrete ceiling shows a deliberate inward turn. Light pools on the floor beside a timber mat and slatted windows, so the room draws daylight from the roof rather than relying on large openings in its walls. The paired elevations extend the same thinking to the facade: one courtyard face closed with louvered metal panels, the other opened with glazing beneath a thin steel canopy.

Read together, these images show how the settlement's larger idea, a strong perimeter that fragments into smaller neighbourhoods, housing rows and communal buildings within, repeats at the scale of a single room. Walls hold the edge, adjustable panels mediate between inside and out, and the sky becomes the most reliable source of openness. It is a restrained vocabulary of concrete, timber and metal, and its restraint is what lets the same system serve homes and collective buildings alike.

Why This Project Matters

Time, Place, Memory treats urban analysis as design material rather than background research. By overlaying grids onto Kandahar's existing fabric and testing what persists across very different districts, the team arrives at a settlement that is new in form but familiar in its spatial rules. That approach offers a credible alternative to the repetitive housing schemes often produced for post-conflict contexts, which tend to ignore how a city already organises privacy, movement and shared ground.

Its larger contribution is a definition of resilience that goes beyond the house. Integrating education, healthcare, agriculture, religious and cultural space into one plan acknowledges that a community of widows needs more than roofs: it needs routines, institutions and places to gather. The project makes the case that memory, embedded in the courtyard, the enclosed block and the graded threshold, can be one of the most practical tools for building a future.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: RICCARDO RENZI, Elena Ceccarelli, Diego Betti, Virginia Vivona, Francesca Cantale

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Project credits: Time, Place, Memory by RICCARDO RENZI, Elena Ceccarelli, Diego Betti, Virginia Vivona, Francesca Cantale Resile (uni.xyz).