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 тАЬmeantime,тАЭ a managerial response that means a constant enduring of the present rather than progress toward a better futureтАФa тАЬchronic present.тАЭ┬а
Building on Borrowed Time takes us to a place where a flood crisis has already arrivedтАФwhere everyday residents are not waiting for the effects of climate change but are in fact already living with itтАФand shows that life in coastal Southeast Asia is defined not by the temporality of climate science but by the lived experience of tidal flooding.
Lukas Ley is senior lecturer in the Institute of Anthropology (Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies) at Heidelberg University, Germany.