Thirteenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Drawing from interdisciplinary foundations in Sustainable Food Systems and Cultural Anthropology along with a focus on Regenerative Architecture and Design, this paper explores relationships between the built environment, food systems, systems of power, and existing forms of eating disorder treatment. This research challenges the pathologization of people’s difficulties with food and embodiment by examining physical and psychological impacts of existing designs of inpatient, residential, and outpatient treatment for eating disorders in the United States. The presented research also radically reimagines what care and treatment can look like through a food-systems-based reframing of eating disorders. It explains and draws from the presenter’s emerging framework, food system alienation, to demonstrate and support the theory that existing treatment models serve to perpetuate the high rates of relapse and mortality for food and body-based struggles. Food system alienation is the systemic material and symbolic separation of people from their sources of food. It includes experiences that meet criteria for eating disorders and disordered eating, but extends beyond reductionist diagnoses, proposing that rather than being disorders, people’s struggles with food and embodiment are culturally, historically, and structurally cultivated to varying degrees. This paper proposes a design for a program that helps existing eating disorder treatment centers transform in ways that center bodily autonomy, expression, and a connection with nature while working to mend some of the alienation people experience in relation to our food systems.