Abstract: The use of PDEs to model social and ecological complex systems has been popularized in the past decades.  In this talk, I present a unifying model for the dynamics of ecological populations and street vendors, an important part of many informal economies.  I discuss the effects of local directed movement of populations subject to the Allee Effect.  Particularly, we will discuss whether directed movement can help a population overcome the Allee effect in the case of bounded and unbounded domains.  I also discuss what happens under competition.  Finally, I will present some related results for local and non-local aggregation equations with an Allee-effect.