Some towns provide land and materials free-of-charge to enable citizens to build their own houses with the help of the community.

Several initiatives aim at sharing knowledge and facilitating self-construction, be it in housing, farming facilities, shelters, etc.

Self-construction can be part of a community project where the members of a community help one in each other to build their own houses

Legal device used in England and Wales, which enables local authorities to put an unoccupied property back into use as housing.

Facilitates negotiation talks with the owners of abandoned buildings and other unused premises.

Based on Ex-propriation and fines in order to avoid buildings lying empty while families and individuals face homelessness on the streets of Andalucía, Spain.

The reusing of abandoned housing may be provided by through law or policy. In other cases, the occupation of buildings is done without the consent of the legal owner of the premises, despite it lying vacant and unused, and is therefore considered illegal.

As hundreds of buildings contine to lie abandoned and unused all across Europe, creative initiatives have appeared in several European countries that aim at mapping abandoned buildings in the hope that they will be later used in some shape or form.

Shared housing experiences, such as neighbours living in the same building, may result in better organisation and sharing of resources, thus facilitating greater access to all involved. Take for example, the sharing of food through the establishment of a group-purchased building, or organising shared care of loved ones.

Local initiatives of this kind involve the recovering of edible food before it ends up in the rubbish bin.

Gleaning is an ancient practice which consists in allowing third parties to collect the produce remaining in the fields after harvest (potatoes, carrots, etc.). Another form, grapping, consists in recovering fruit from the trees (grapes, apples, etc.). The practice of retrieving food from rubbish bins that has been thrown away, but which is perfectly edible, is also common.

Particularly in the context of the present economic climate, initiatives are emerging in communities across Europe that involve the planting of any suitable piece of land and sharing the produce grown. The benefits of these kinds of movements are multi-fold.

Community gardens are those that are shared, cultivated and managed by a community of residents.

Most notably developed in Italy, GAS ("solidarity purchase groups") bring together consumers who wish to buy products as a collective from one or more producers.

AMAP ("Associations for the maintenance of peasant agriculture") appeared in France in the early 2000s. It is a scheme that provides consumers with direct access to produce and allows growers to plan for the long-term.

In France, the provision of a registered address enables an asylum seeker, who is homeless, to declare his or her address at any NGO that has been specially approved by the French administration.

The Italian experience of providing a reference address to homeless people, from the perspective of the NGO Avvocato di Strada

Avvocato di strada (Street lawyer) is an association of lawyers established with the objective to protect homeless people, increasingly deprived of their fundamental rights and trapped in a situation from which they are unlikely to leave.

This practice consists in creating physical or virtual places that have the same legal force as private homes, which anyone can declare as their official address when voting or claiming entitlements.

Street lawyers work to inform people in poverty, and more specifically homeless people, about their rights and to assist them in legal proceedings.