Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang

by Lukas Ley

A timely ethnography of how Indonesia’s coastal dwellers inhabit the “chronic present” of a slow-motion natural disaster

Ice caps are melting, seas are rising, and densely populated cities worldwide are threatened by floodwaters, especially in Southeast Asia. Building on Borrowed Time is a timely and powerful ethnography of how people in Semarang, Indonesia, on the north coast of Java, are dealing with this global warming–driven existential challenge. In addition to antiflooding infrastructure breaking down, vast areas of cities like Semarang and Jakarta are rapidly sinking, affecting the very foundations of urban toxic water oozes through the floors of houses, bridges are submerged, traffic is interrupted.  As Lukas Ley shows, the residents of Semarang are constantly engaged in maintaining their homes and streets, trying to live through a slow-motion disaster shaped by the interacting temporalities of infrastructural failure, ecological deterioration, and urban development. He casts this predicament through the temporal lens of a “meantime,” a managerial response that means a constant enduring of the present rather than progress toward a better future—a “chronic present.”  Building on Borrowed Time takes us to a place where a flood crisis has already arrived—where everyday residents are not waiting for the effects of climate change but are in fact already living with it—and shows that life in coastal Southeast Asia is defined not by the temporality of climate science but by the lived experience of tidal flooding.

246 pages, Paperback

Published November 23, 2021

Reviews

[Rizkiana Sidqi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This award-winning book is truly an example of the paid-off hard work in making science be available for wider audience. Dr Lukas' writing comprehensively portray the history, politics, and day to day struggle of the people in Semarang, while also mainly criticizing the infrastructural adaptation. His phrase "borrowed time", i think really is genius in terms of not merely shows the critics but also put forth the danger while only relying the coastal protection through this manner. This book provides a significant knowledge for urban coastal dynamics issues, but from anthropological and human geography perspectives.

[FluffyNyctea]

Deni lives in a small brick house in a North Semarang kampung, one narrow embankment road away from the Banger River. The embankment is but one among the many verging-on-breakdown infrastructures in the kampung. As the tide rises, water seeps through the embankment’s cracks, and submerges the dirt floors of Deni’s abode. So, when Deni is not sweating away at his food stand, among whirring mosquitos and roaring trucks, he is likely occupied by the river, sometimes stacking odd bits of building material against the breaking embankment. Just as Deni attempts to stabilise infrastructural affordances, his body breaks down – fevers and strokes, exhaustion and intoxication…. Deni is ill, not simply because of his body, but because he does not meet the ideal of health. That is, his illness does not align with what infrastructure should be – how can the future be swelling water and shrinking land, and constant reminders of mortality? But his illness is what infrastructure is – unevenly distributed materialities. Under infrastructural conditions, illness is the materiality of health, finitude is the materiality of futurity.