Building on borrowed time: rising seas and failing infrastructure in semarang By LukasLey (Ed.), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 2021. 240 pp. (pbk). <scp>US</scp>$27.00 (Sc). <scp>ISBN</scp>: 9781517908881. <scp>US</scp>$108.00 (Hc.)

Lukas Ley's first monograph, Building on Borrowed Time, carefully explores the frequent floods of a coastal city in Java. The residents of the kampung Kemijen, in the north of the city of Semarang, are always under threat of rob, a local Javanese term for tidal flooding. Ley's anthropological approach is to delve into the depths of this murky water to understand the whirling currents below. He traces a host of interrelated influences: Dutch colonial planning regimes, Indonesian nationalist modernisation projects, community-based responses, unusual allegiances between community organisations and the state, interventions by Dutch hydrologists and community-based art projects. Ley's approach is as illustrative as it is instructive: he demonstrates a way of doing anthropology in the city while keeping people's everyday experiences at the centre. Following an introduction that sets out the conceptual frame and explains some details about the field site, Chapter 1 offers an in-depth historical analysis of the emergence of settlements in the swamp. Chapter 2 continues this story by exploring the recent government interventions and urbanisation, connected closely with national political dynamics of the New Order. Chapter 3 offers insights into the everyday experiences of life in North Semarang, while Chapter 4 explores the experience of residents as political subjects interacting with ongoing infrastructure projects. Chapter 5 focuses on a jointly managed anti-flooding project which brings together the national government, the municipality of Semarang, and the water authority of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to show the tensions between promises of political transformation and a dependency on technical solutions. There is no conclusion—‘I'm not a friend of conclusions’ (p. 195), Ley writes—but this feels apt in a text about a chaotic and chronic present in which the story of rob in Kemijen is not yet resolved and, indeed, is likely to only get worse. Instead, Ley ends with a substantial afterward that draws together the various analytical currents and muses on the future possibilities and limits for people and communities responding to ecological transformations. To inform his analysis, Ley productively engages with concepts from anthropology and broader social theory, as well as some interesting analysis of historical material and policy documents. The text also includes a user-friendly index and a helpful glossary of Indonesian words. The text proposes a focus on the temporal dimension of crisis, using the concept of ‘building on borrowed time’. The concept is a creative and useful analytical tool. It derives from Ley's argument that residents' efforts to address flooding are, in fact, unsustainable in the long term. The residents of Kemijen are, therefore, living in a chronic present. The proposed analytical approach is to frame crisis as truncating possible futures and emphasising the maintenance of an ongoing present. The concept is sound and analytically productive, but I was looking forward to its greater theoretical development, especially given it is highlighted in the book's title. This concept could prove useful, alongside other concepts like precarity, in analysing the truncated temporalities created by crisis by focusing on the everyday subjective experiences of time and value among affected communities. Ley demonstrates the value of considered engagement with historical material. His archival research reveals important inflection points in the long durée that have created the dynamics of present-day Kemijen (p. 43). He finds that the area had long been considered problematic and uninhabitable, attitudes which continue to shape contemporary opinion. As well as incorporating archival research, Ley uses visual methods to add texture to his ethnographic work. In Chapter 3 (pp. 111–118), he includes a small visual tour of home fronts in Kemijen, focusing on the physical strategies that residents use to protect their homes from flooding. The collection of photos, although greyscale, vividly illustrates strategies of uplifting homes with concrete and the gradually heightened ceilings that follow. In this way, the images offer a visual window into the places described in Ley's ethnographic prose. Ley's writing vividly captures life in the kampung. The text is dense in some parts, but always conceptually rich. Readers will be rewarded with insightful theoretical contributions and regular invitations into Ley's ethnographic encounters. His organic approach to participant observation shines through the text, adding detail and texture to the ethnographic analysis. Ley's unplanned encounters with interlocutors during participant observation reveal things that he might not otherwise have asked about, such as when he bumped into Wahyu at the subdistrict office and overheard his conversation with the lurah [subdistrict head] (p. 123), or how a conversation with Jusuf, which was intended to kill time while waiting for an engineer's presentation, turned into an ‘impromptu interview’ given Jusuf's relevant role as a village chief (p. 104). These vignettes show how Ley embraces the murkiness of the ethnographic method and the productive chance encounters which come from long-term engagement to gain unique perspectives and possibilities for collaborative analysis (p. 123). Building on Borrowed Time is an exciting and relevant book for scholars and policymakers who are interested in climate change, urban infrastructure and ways of understanding everyday life in the chronic present of crisis. Development workers should not be put off by the book's engagement with academic debates, as this story is an excellent demonstration of the importance of considering history and politics when delivering technical solutions to address impacts of climate change. In addition, the book offers a unique intervention in the study of Indonesian kampungs by exploring how Kemijen relates to the broader city that has grown to encompass it. Ley's analysis of the impacts of climate change on extant social systems is a prescient warning and offers a framework for future studies of the social and material impacts of climate change on communities. The ethnographic approach—humble, organic, and enthusiastically embracing archival and visual methods—shows a way of doing analytically rich and ethically grounded anthropology about crisis in the city.