In environments where many things don’t work, are broken down, are even beyond recognition through overuse and lack of upkeep, it is easy for certain things to lose meaning or substance. So trying to keep things intact as a shelter against the easy parasitism of both desperate and powerful others, economy is a device to keep the value of things open to new uses and sites.  Thus, to grasp the fierce ambivalence of many clearly impoverished urban districts requires an appreciation for the oscillations of value.  An appreciation of how bodies, lives, built environments and materials continuously enjoin and break from associations that enable temporary shelters and opportunities—where the civil and uncivil, the benevolent and the manipulative propel each other somewhere else, momentarily away from homogenized misery or individual advantage.  No one can go it alone; yet it is not clear with whom one should or could go; and one must go, somewhere or else be swallowed by “more powerful mouths”, always plentiful.