More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas

Lacy M. Johnson

Hardcover

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2022 Art in Service to the Environment Award, Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter
Honorable Mention, 2022 Nonfiction Prize, Writers' League of Texas

Writers explore a city's relationship with chronic catastrophic flooding.

Shortly after Hurricane Harvey dumped a record 61 inches of rain on Houston in 2017, celebrated writer and Bayou City resident Lacy M. Johnson began collecting flood stories. Although these stories attested to the infinite variety of experience in America's most diverse city, they also pointed to a consistent question: What does catastrophic flooding reveal about this city, and what does it obscure?

More City than Water brings together essays, conversations, and personal narratives from climate scientists, marine ecologists, housing activists, urban planners, artists, poets, and historians as they reflect on the human geography of a region increasingly defined by flooding. Both a literary and a cartographic anthology, More City than Water features striking maps of Houston's floodplains, waterways, drainage systems, reservoirs, and inundated neighborhoods. Designed by University of Houston seniors from the Graphic Design program, each map, imaginative and precise, shifts our understanding of the flooding, the public's relationship to it, and the fraught reality of rebuilding. Evocative and unique, this is an atlas that uncovers the changing nature of living where the waters rise.

Book Details

Publisher: University of Texas Press
Publish Date: Jul 5th, 2022
Pages: 264
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 10.20in - 7.40in - 1.10in - 2.65lb
EAN: 9781477325001
Categories: • Environmental Conservation & Protection - General• Essays• General

About the Author

Lacy M. Johnson is the author of the essay collection The Reckonings and the memoirs The Other Side and Trespasses. Her writing has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Travel Writing, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the founding director of the Houston Flood Museum.

Cheryl Beckett is an associate professor and area coordinator at the Kathryn G. McGovern College of the Arts, University of Houston School of Art, Graphic Design Program. Beckett has served as the creative director at Minor Design in Houston since 1987.

Praise for this book

[A] strong anthology...the variety of voices and formats gives the work a sense of breadth. It adds up to a tough, thought-provoking depiction of the wreckage wrought by a changing climate.-- "Publishers Weekly" (4/21/2022 12:00:00 AM)

[More City Than Water] is beautiful, moving, and, most fundamentally, provocative--a collective portrait of a city defined for good and ill by its relationship to water.-- "Alta Journal" (6/20/2022 12:00:00 AM)

More City Than Water should serve as an inspiration for scholars working in the fields of digital and environmental humanities...This book points the way toward imagining 'environmental citizenship' as an essential practice in communities around the world.-- "Frugal Chariot" (7/12/2022 12:00:00 AM)

This volume of stories by historians, housing activists, urban planners, climate scientists, marine biologists, poets, artists and longtime residents demonstrate resilience, creativity and even hope.-- "Austin American-Statesman" (11/3/2022 12:00:00 AM)

Excellent.-- "New York Times" (4/10/2023 12:00:00 AM)

Never failing their orientation, the band of Houstonians featured in this book eloquently prove the power of the pen by offering a realistic climate poetics. If persistently and repeatedly applied to densely inhabited flood zones, atlases like this one may lead to a global wake-up call whose alarm may even reach the politicians.

-- "The Architect's Newspaper" (5/19/2023 12:00:00 AM)

What makes the volume cohere so well and become more than the sum of its parts is a shared set of concerns about "our relationship to the land, to the future, to flooding, and to one another.-- "Southwestern Historical Quarterly" (7/6/2023 12:00:00 AM)

More City Than Water is . . . compelling in many ways. It is academic yet personal, critical yet accessible, local yet global, pessimistic but not cynical, hopeful but not blindly. Its maps are immersive, allowing for extended meditation on existential questions related to human interconnectivity and our collective embeddedness as members of the environment rather than its masters. It will be a worthwhile addition to undergraduate syllabi and, more widely, to all those who care about Houston, climate change, and human rights.-- "H-Net Reviews (H-Water)" (1/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)

More City Than Water is a beautiful object, beautiful in the way that wrinkles and scars mark skin with truths of a life lived...This is not a book for bystanders. Readers will be implicated, gaining not only critical insights into the infrastructure of one flood-ridden city but also surprising connections to other cities, from Houston to Harlem and to Hermosillo...Listening is only the first step, and the noise of More City Than Water will linger with you long after you close its pages.-- "Western American Literature" (6/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)