More City Than Water

This anthology is a literary and cartographic interpretation of Houston's floodplains, waterways, drainage systems, reservoirs, and inundated zones. Just after Hurricane Harvey dumped a record sixty-one inches of rain on the city in 2017, writer and Houston resident Lacy M. Johnson created the Houston Flood Museum, an online archive for stories about Harvey and other floods. A year later, she began commissioning and collecting the essays that appear in this volume, each of which is illustrated with a map created by seniors in the graphic design program at UH. She asked each contributor, What does chronic catastrophic flooding reveal about this city and the way we live in it, and what does it obscure?" With essays from climate scholars, marine ecologists, housing activists, architects, urban planners, artists, poets, and historians, the book is intentionally interdisciplinary to reflect the complexity of the flooding that increasingly defines Houston"--