This article explores transnational migration to the European Union (EU) and its entanglements with human-built structures in Bihać, a city in northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In March 2018, this postwar and postsocialist city located on the northwestern edge of the country emerged as the newest “hot spot” on the so-called Balkan migrant route. This is due to the city’s proximity to Croatia, and thus the EU border, and because of the closing of the borders and routes elsewhere in Europe.

Since 2018, the city has been harboring up to 5000 refugees and migrants from South Asia, the Middle East, and Northern Africa who are repeatedly trying to cross into Croatia and the rest of the EU. While waiting to cross into the EU, migrants navigate everyday living among the people of Bihać.

In this article, I illustrate how buildings in Bihać facilitate migrants’ experiences of dislocation and migration. By focusing on one, seemingly irrelevant (to transnational migration) structure in town—the Center—I pay attention to the less noticeable spaces in town. It is precisely in these less conspicuous buildings, I contend, that migrant encounters occur and get incorporated into the local environment in a patchy fashion—folding into some spaces while skipping over others. I call this incorporation of transnational migration and violent border regimes into local built environments “patchy internalization.”