More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas ed. by Lacy M. Johnson and Cheryl Beckett (review)

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Reviewed by:

• More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas ed. by Lacy M. Johnson and Cheryl Beckett
• Kelly McKisson

Lacy M. Johnson and Cheryl Beckett, eds., More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas. Austin: U of Texas P, 2022. 264 pp, 30 color illustrations, 19 maps. Hardcover, $39.95.

Before the 2021 Texas freeze, before the COVID-19 pandemic, my Houston experience was punctuated by Hurricane Harvey. In August 2017 I moved my partner and my cat and our belongings to Houston for graduate school. We could just afford a 500-something-square-foot, second-floor apartment in the Montrose neighborhood. Great location was a common refrain, and at the time it meant a thirty-minute walk from Rice University's campus. Harvey made landfall at the end of the first week of classes. [End Page 197] The cat cowered under the couch as we nervously tended a weeping ceiling crack. "Great location" meant that on Sunday, August 27, from the second-floor landing, we could take pictures of the flood water swelling through the small parking lot, through the courtyard and to the base of the building. The close, but not too close, proximity was evidence of both disaster and our relative safety.

Storms do not discriminate, but human-made policy and infrastructure unevenly distribute vulnerability. As Lacy M. Johnson writes, "though rain might fall without regard for social or economic disparities, flooding reinforces the inequalities that surround us every day" (4). Wealthier Houston neighborhoods, such as Montrose, rarely flood, especially not with toxic surges from Houston's oil and chemical refineries. If "Houston is designed to flood," Johnson declares that it is time to tell the difficult story of that design and its uneven impacts (6).

More City than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas, edited by Johnson, associate professor at Rice, and Cheryl Beckett, associate professor at University of Houston School of Art, takes up this challenge. The book is a project of the Houston Flood Museum (houstonfloodmuseum.org), which Johnson founded after Harvey and which collects stories to make connections between the city's flood history and human activities. The book's twenty-two entries offer histories, personal narratives, conversation, and poetry, and each is paired with artwork designed by senior graphic design students at the University of Houston. Selections might be taught in classes on environmental justice, histories of the Gulf South, sociologies of disaster, or climate change, and students will especially be rewarded by attending to the interplay of text and images.

More City than Water is a beautiful object, beautiful in the way that wrinkles and scars mark skin with truths of a life lived: the maps visualize difficult realities, for example Houston's thirty-nine wastewater plants and their intimate proximity to bayous and parks (54–55), or the distance between the worst flooded areas of South Houston and life-saving centers of shelter, pharmacy, and medical aid (182–83). The essays explore flood narratives both "tangible" and "invisible," a palimpsest that Bryan Washington writes can be revealed by these disaster moments, complicating the city's "supposed wealth in the face of poverty, its supposed goodness in the midst of [End Page 198] neglect" (114). The histories describe intentional engineering of flood paths, such as Aimee VonBokel, Tanya Debose, and Alexandria Parson's account of Interstate 610's construction, which redirected not only pollution but also bayou water into the Black neighborhood of Independence Heights. Compounding the damages of before come the mistreatment of the after; in her contribution Sonia Marie Del Hierro remembers, "later, a FEMA agent questioned / my choices: 'The kitchen table seems fine'" (86). Readers see how the feedback loop of social and political actions mirrors the geophysical consequences of subsident land—Alex Ortiz explains, saltwater intrusion into wetlands harm plant life, which "expose[s] more land to potential erosion and land loss … the more it happens, the worse it is" (263).

I still cannot quite describe my experience of the storm, as we lived it, nor is this the purpose of More City than Water. This is not a book for bystanders. Readers will be implicated, gaining not only critical insights into the infrastructure of one flood...