Denizen Awarded Global Incubator Seed Grant

Assistant Professor Seth Denizen was awarded a Global Incubator Seed Grant for his collaborative project on wastewater urbanism with Christina Seibe at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Established in 2021, the grant program aims to stimulate high-impact research initiatives linking WashU faculty and international collaborators. These projects are expected to lead to next-stage funding, publications, and deeper ties between WashU and partners around the globe.

Funding for this year’s cycle is made possible with support from the Office of the Provost, the “Here and Next” strategic plan, and the Millard family gift to the McDonnell International Scholars Academy.

By the year 2050, urban water demand will increase by 80% and climate change will alter the quantity and timing of surface water in regions that are already experiencing water shortages. Under these conditions, conflict between urban and agricultural areas over water will increase. Urban wastewater reuse is a potential solution to these conflicts, returning wastewater rich in plant nutrients to agricultural areas in exchange for priority access to water, but there are risks. Heavy metals, industrial waste, plastics, parasites, and environmentally persistent pharmaceuticals have become ubiquitous byproducts of urbanization, making the safe reuse of this water a challenge. This is the condition found in Mexico City today, where the world’s largest wastewater agriculture system irrigates around 230,000 acres of land with the wastewater of 22 million people. This system poses health risks, but it also increases Mexico’s climate resilience in a warming world. The team’s research will investigate the set of urban policies and practices that would make wastewater agriculture sustainable in central Mexico. Their hypothesis is that wastewater agriculture also requires a missing wastewater urbanism.

Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture, evolutionary biology, and human geography. His published work is multidisciplinary, addressing art and design, soil science, urban geography, and agriculture. He holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied the political ecology of soil in the Mexico City-Mezquital Valley hydrological system. In 2019 he was a recipient of the SOM Foundation Research Prize and has previously taught at Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Hong Kong, and Princeton, where he was a Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. He is an assistant professor at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and has a forthcoming book with Harvard Design Press with Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich, “Thinking Through Soil: Wastewater Agriculture in the Mezquital Valley.” He serves on the editorial board of Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy.