Eroded and Reconfigured: Provisional Endurance of Peripheral Dwelling spaces along the Belgian-French Route to the UK.

Eroded and Reconfigured: Provisional Endurance of Peripheral Dwelling spaces along the Belgian-French Route to the UK. This paper examines how migration governance unfolds in the peripheral spaces along the Belgian-French route to the UK, where a state strategy of preventing the sedimentation of transit-oriented dwelling is actively contested. Focusing on highway rest areas, abandoned warehouses, and border zones beyond major urban centers, the study explores how the ‘zero point of fixation’ strategy seeks to eliminate dwelling spaces for people on the move, revealing broader peripheral dynamics in migration control. Drawing on mobile ethnography and activist engagement with squats, encampments, and emergency shelters along this route, this research traces how en route migrants and their supporters navigate these peripheral spaces where erosion and reconfiguration is negotiated among local state authorities, solidarity organizers, and for-profit facilitators. The paper conceptualizes "erosion" as ongoing processes of criminalisation and dismantlement that subtract dwelling spaces from en route migrants, while "reconfiguration" captures how alternative dwelling formations emerge in response. Three post-expulsion scenarios illustrate this dynamic: first, tactical relocation through uneven negotiations among state actors, solidarity networks, and dwellers; second, commodification where scarcity stratifies access and blurs boundaries between not-for-profit and for-profit forms of facilitation; and third, commoning rehearsals that create solidarity hubs yet remain vulnerable to appropriation by border-crossing economies. The analysis demonstrates that governance in these peripheral borderlands targets not merely migrants and civil society, but the very capacity for sedimentation and accumulation of resources and alliances in space. Migration control seeks to dismantle spaces that allow degrees of stability and thereby facilitate onward movement. Yet the state's strategy of dispersal does not simply erode dwelling spaces; it triggers their reconfiguration along lines of translocal connectivity among peripheral sites, ultimately shaping the morphology of the Belgian-French route to the UK itself.