Zanabad: A City for Women Built from Courtyards, Shared Kitchens and a Cycle of Resilience

Most architecture for vulnerable residents stops at the roof. A shelter is built, beds are counted, and the question of how people actually rebuild a life is left to someone else. Zanabad, "City for Women", refuses that shortcut. It starts from the daily rhythms of women and their children (cooking, childcare, schooling, earning, growing food, finding a moment alone) and lets those rhythms set the plan. The result is not an institution but a neighbourhood, one where the house, the courtyard, the workshop and the market are designed as parts of a single support system.

Designed by Flore Guichot, the project was selected as an Editor's Choice entry in Resil. Guichot reads sustainability broadly. Energy and materials matter, but the proposal is more interested in whether a community can sustain itself: share responsibilities, educate its children, cultivate food, generate income, and still give each resident enough privacy to keep her autonomy. The settlement moves outward in deliberate steps, from the individual house to the courtyard, from the courtyard to the residential cluster, and from there to the school, mosque, gardens, workshops and marketplace of the wider town.

A Plan Drawn from Five Daily Needs, Not a Building Type

The title carries the project's central argument. Zanabad is not a city of women, defined by who lives there, but a city for women, defined by whose lives shaped the planning decisions. Guichot organises the neighbourhood around five interconnected themes: protection, care, education, training and production. Together they form what the project calls a cycle of resilience, and the drawings treat each theme as something with a spatial address rather than an abstract service.

This is where the scheme earns its credibility. Each layer has a defined job. The house offers independence. The courtyard introduces cooperation. Collective kitchens and childcare spaces take repetitive domestic work off individual shoulders. Workshops build skills and output, schools serve both children and adults, gardens feed the community, and the market ties all of it to a wider economy. Read together, the buildings stop looking like a collection of programmes and start to resemble an operating framework for recovery.

Six Houses Around a Courtyard: Choosing When to Join In

The strongest idea in Zanabad is that community can be designed as infrastructure without dissolving the individual. Every family receives its own independent home. Those homes are then grouped, six to a courtyard, so that shared outdoor space sits directly beyond the front door but never inside it. The gradient from private to collective to public is gentle and legible, which lets residents decide how and when to take part.

That choice is the point. Communal housing often fails because shared life is imposed as a condition of occupancy. Here, collective support is offered as an opportunity rather than an obligation. The courtyard works as a threshold where neighbours can meet, children can play under watchful eyes, and help can be asked for, yet a closed door still means something. For women rebuilding stability, that balance between belonging and autonomy is arguably as important as any square metre of floor area.

Architecture That Grows with the Neighbourhood's Social Capacity

Guichot's operating diagrams make the scaling logic explicit. Courtyard groups combine into clusters, and each step up in size unlocks new shared facilities: collective kitchens, nurseries, wash houses and gardens first, then workshops, recreational areas, orchards and vegetable plots, and finally educational buildings, a community centre, a mosque and a marketplace. The programme expands at the same pace as the community's ability to run it.

This incremental structure is quietly radical for a competition entry. Rather than presenting a finished masterplan, the project describes a growth rule, one that could be applied phase by phase as residents arrive and relationships form. Civic and productive spaces are not dropped in at the start as empty gestures; they appear when there are enough households to fill and sustain them. It is a planning model that treats social density, not just population, as the trigger for building.

Why This Project Matters

Zanabad shifts the brief for resilient housing from shelter to life support in the fullest sense. By tying each programme to a specific scale, from private room to public market, Guichot shows how architecture can redistribute the invisible labour that so often falls on women: childcare, cooking, washing, provisioning. Those tasks become shared infrastructure, and the time freed up flows toward education, training and income.

Just as valuable is the project's restraint around community. It never confuses togetherness with surveillance or uniformity. The independent home anchors every resident's dignity, and the courtyard, cluster and town are offered around it as layers she can step into at will. For designers working on post-crisis settlements, refugee housing or social housing more broadly, Zanabad offers a clear and transferable lesson: design the relationships first, and let the buildings scale with them.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Flore Guichot

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Project credits: Zanabad, “City for Women” by Flore Guichot Resil (uni.xyz).