Building on Borrowed Time: The Temporal Horizons of Infrastructural Breakdown in the Delta of Semarang

Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork and one month of archival research, this doctoral thesis describes the predicament of residents of a coastal sub-district in the city Semarang, Indonesia. They must constantly adapt to the sinking foundations of their houses as well as dysfunctional drainage infrastructure. As neighbourhoods threaten to sink below sea level, daily incidents of tidal flooding demand timely adaptation and constant repair of houses and river banks. “Building on Borrowed Time” portrays the multiple ways of enduring this situation, exploring the divergent and often contradictory temporalities that congregate around water. It argues that residents endure a situation of chronic breakdown. It is through the logic of chronic breakdown that ecological transformations as well as political shifts are analyzed in this thesis. While it describes the temporal horizons of breakdown from the perspective of riverside residents, it also offers a historical account of the emergence of coastal settlements in late colonial times. Here, state interventions force indigenous coastal dwellers into a marginal position regarding the city’s spatial and political configuration. Today, in view of the region’s advanced disconnect from the ‘modern’ spaces of the city, the post-colonial state’s concern with sanitation, crime, and ecological degradation explains the emergence of a specific governance of local time. This governance reproduces a present in which ecological disaster in the lives of coastal dwellers is recursive and requires constant managing. Drawing on Cazdyn’s notion of the ‘chronic’ and Povinelli’s concept of ‘quasi-events,’ I show that state agencies, through neighbourhood-level organs of power and bottom-up development schemes, cultivate a ‘meantime’ that does not produce lasting relief, but further “colonizes” the future. An ethnography of the present reveals the temporal practices of this meantime, such as repair and maintenance of infrastructure. These practices effectively replace development (“pembangunan”) projected in plans with continuous but desultory stacking-up (“peninggian”) and fixing of infrastructure. While a spirit of ‘real’ development converges upon the area, driven by crisis scenarios of Dutch and Indonesian water experts, these plans are characteristic of a neoliberal remaking of lifeworlds that ultimately reinforces the chronic.Ph.D