Dwelling against dispersal: improvisational endurance and infrastructuring along the route to the United Kingdom

State abandonment of ‘Dublinized’ migrants in Brussels pushes many towards the United Kingdom, where the Dublin Regulation no longer governs access to international protection. Along the Belgian–French route, a deliberate dispersal strategy has emerged to prevent unauthorized mobility through the systemic erosion of precarious dwelling: encampments, squats and respite shelters that once enabled the dwelling en route are subjected to continuous cycles of expulsion, rendering dwelling scarce, scattered and perpetually reconstituted. This article examines the improvisational endurance that emerges in the aftermath of expulsion. Drawing on 18 months of activist ethnographic fieldwork, and in dialogue with subaltern infrastructural politics, solidarity studies and mobile commons theory, I analyze three modes of dwelling-making through which solidarity actors, facilitators and migrants en route produced dwelling infrastructure from below. I argue that improvisation becomes infrastructural not despite dispersal but through it: structured around care, survival economies and the iterative capacity to reassemble what each cycle of eviction eroded. In sustaining this dwelling circuit, citizen support is resignified. No longer humanitarian gesture filling institutional gaps, but an enactment of alternative citizenship that contests state’s monopoly over the terms on which migrants can be recognized, sustained and kept in motion.