More City than Water

Houston is the problem and the solution, the dream and the nightmare, the big blue bubble in a still-red state, a global capital for oil production and the most diverse city in the country, a place menaced by future climate catastrophes and the soup bowl into which it already rained sixty-one inches in one storm: 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, which is the particular focus here. Nothing less than this brilliant chorus of writers and mapmakers could capture all that range and contradiction; gathered here, they tell of land and water,  inequality and solidarity, possibility and threat. ‘Hurricane Harvey reinforced my belief in the power of water,’ writes marine biologist and native Houstonian Elaine Shen in one of the book’s riveting essays, and More City Than Water reinforces my belief in the power of creative atlases. Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell and lead author of Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

I was gripped by More City Than Water from start to finish. If you didn't know how the historic flows of water, wealth, and power have shaped Houston and cities like it around the nation, the maps and narratives here can be your guide. And the book is an affirmation for those who have never been able to ignore the toxic seep industrial capitalism leaves some communities to drown in. It's not an easy book to read, but these pages are as insistent and inescapable as water pouring into the bayou. The words and images in More City Than Water insist on nothing but the truth. Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The History of a Black Mother's Garden

This kaleidoscopic essay collection paints an intimate portrait of Houston, Texas, through multiple, and at times divergent, lenses. Houston is ground zero for three of the twenty-first century's defining phenomena––urban development, extraction, and climate change––and as such it has the power to teach us about how people and communities evolve even as the place that unites them changes irrevocably. Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

[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

[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

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

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

Excellent. New York Times

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

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

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)

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