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.
Since 1992, the Houston metropolitan area has lost nearly 70 percent of its wetlands, putting more pressure on bayous and our built infrastructure and making us increasingly susceptible to flooding. This map shows the region’s twenty-two bayou systems and waterways, revealing just how connected by water we are.
Design by Julia Ong and Kristen Fernandes
in the days following Harvey, shelter locations in downtown Houston’s flood areas increased steadily. Bryan Washington made an attempt to volunteer at a shelter, only to discover the shelters needed only bilingual speakers and those with medical training.
Design by Miryoung Kim and Manuel Vazquez
Several incidents and spills were reported by oil and gas companies along Buffalo Bayou. These descriptions were riddled with vague and repetitive phrases that indicated a lack of industrial integrity and care for the environment as well as for the people who live in fenceline communities along the bayou.
Design by Julia Ong