Books and Bytes is a series of talks by local authors who discuss the research, writing, and publication of their art, architecture, or design book. Our community of scholars is invited to participate in discussions afterward, so they may learn from one another’s experiences. Books and Bytes is co-sponsored by the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design and the University of Houston Libraries. 
We are pleased to host the editors of More City than Water: a Houston Flood Atlas, Lacy M. Johnson, Rice University, and Cheryl Beckett, UH College of the Arts, as well as Susan Rogers, UH College of Architecture and Design, who authored one of the chapters.
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.
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