The Swedish city of Malmö is renowned globally for groundbreaking work on environmental sustainability. The Western Harbour development is a showcase for how to use cutting edge architecture and green building techniques. Ekostaden Augustenborg - one of Sweden's largest urban sustainability projects - has transformed an area of 1960s mass housing, both environmentally and socially.

The city is very different to the Swedish mono-cultural stereotype. Malmö has prided itself on being welcoming to refugees. Many have come to the city in recent decades from Iran, Iraq, Somalia and former Yugoslavia. If you walk around the centre it's relaxed, affluent, and modern. However, outside the centre of the city many residents are cut off from the overall prosperity.

In the last two years tensions between groups have spilled over into riots and disorder. This has happened in the areas with the biggest immigrant-born populations, where poverty is concentrated, with unemployment well over 50 per cent, and poor housing conditions. Significant investment in the last five years through the ‘welfare for all' programme to improve education and living conditions are seen to have failed. In the recent national elections, the far right Swedish Democrats polled as much as 30 per cent in some neighbourhoods.

The city administration is now testing new ways of tackling social problems. The focus is on four of the most challenging urban areas - Herrgården, Holma-Kroksback, Lindängen and Seved. The ambition is to build on their expertise, and profile, as leaders in environmental sustainability and to develop cutting edge approaches to social sustainability.

The Young Foundation is working with the municipality to draw on the global experience of bringing social innovation methods and thinking to the regeneration of local neighbourhoods. The aim is to work with the grain of people's lives, building on local strengths and energy.

And while the challenges are great, there is also a lot happening to build on. In Seved, a neighbourhood often associated with drug dealers and local gangs, community gardening has taken root. Outside Cafe Rasmus (home to an active Somali community group) Brazilian-born street artist Limpo is reclaiming public walls. BGRA (which stands for Movement for the Voice and Face of the Streets) is working with young people to give them a voice, using video and hip hop.

in Rosengård, a community within the priority area programme, the resident-led ‘Sustainable Hilda' project has developed a strong business plan to renovate and retrofit a typical Swedish 1960s development built as part of the million homes programme.

The city's ambition to become a trailblazer for social sustainability makes sense. But it will be challenging. Over the next few months we'll be talking to people who are the objects of social policy about how they can be put at the centre of the regeneration process, and how service design techniques can help generate new ways to deal with familiar (and often seemingly intractable) problems.