Springboards Before the Fence: Urban Makeshift Camps as Mobility Infrastructures on the Bosnia–Croatia Border

Abstract This paper frames migrant makeshift camps as mobility infrastructures, bridging scholarship on informal dwellings and migration infrastructures with the case of Bihać, a transit city on the Bosnia–Croatia border. The central idea is that grassroots makeshift camps assembled in abandoned buildings or tents play a key infrastructural role in supporting migrants' difficult journeys. Over months‐long fieldwork along the Bosnia–Croatia border, the author combined ethnography with migrant‐solidarity activism, gathering fieldnotes, photographing makeshift camps, and interviewing activists to reconstruct witnessed accounts of migrant encamping in Bihać. This mix of methods, here termed “counter‐forensics”, was key to understanding the mobility‐enabling power of makeshift camps along the Balkan Route. As the article highlights, makeshift camps can work as mobility infrastructures against immobilising borders, enabling migrants to (1) “hide” in urban interstices to reduce their visibility and access resources, (2) live together while preparing routes with smugglers, and (3) contest state‐enforced evictions through disobedient reoccupations.