Malmö serves as an illustration of how urban governance arrangements provide structures for social innovations and where the city of Malmö could be categorized as an example of the governance of social challenges. This chapter contributes to the debate on social innovations by arguing that attention must be paid to the relationship between inertia, clearings in local contexts, and innovations in order to understand the underpinnings of social innovations in local welfare regimes. Specifically, in addition to describing the local welfare regime and a set of social innovations in the city of Malmö, the chapter analyses the different types of clearings that proved fertile for the development of the social innovations under study. Rather than arguing that social innovations come to the fore as a result of the quality of certain individuals or being locally and socially embedded, the authors put forth that innovations may also emerge in clearings as a consequence of inertia, in the case of Malmö in the shape and form of an unwillingness to change due to political and ideological factors.

Children of Single (Lone) Mothers is a project carried out by Fryshuset, a well-known and entrepreneurial third sector organisation with a wide range of activities within the field of youth policy. This project started with the aim to support and strengthen children living with a single mother in economically vulnerable circumstances. From a health perspective, the focus is on the everyday situation of children and mothers. This represents an example of an innovation initiated within civil society, in line with the traditional role of third sector organisations to be pioneers and to focus attention on new needs and new groups with needs that are not covered in other ways. There are elements of advocacy in this innovation with the aim to raise attention to the issue of child poverty and the situation of unemployed or low-income single mothers. Fryshuset implements this by developing cooperation with different stakeholders and spreads awareness on this subject through these channels.

This article focuses on homelessness among families with children in Sweden, and particularly on the situation of homeless families in Stockholm. The objective is to contribute to the understanding of homelessness by suggesting an intersectional analysis that both includes different levels of analysis – that is, at structural, institutional and household levels – and allows gender, class and migration parameters to be taken into consideration. On the structural level, a restructured housing market in combination with a disman-tling of housing policy has raised the threshold for entering the primary housing market, especially for individuals and families with limited economic resources. In addition to the risk of being discriminated against based on ethnicity, this restructuring has appreciably raised the difficulty of entering the market on a more general level. At the institutional level, local social authorities offer solutions to homelessness that have been developed for more traditional groups of homeless people, namely, single men with alcohol or drug problems; they lack the means to change the structural conditions of the housing market or the distribution of housing, and can only expand the secondary housing market, in which people are at risk of becoming 'trapped' as the gap between the primary and secondary housing markets becomes increasingly large. On the individual/household level, a combination of single motherhood, immigra-tion and limited financial resources clearly increases the risk of homelessness and exclusion from other social arenas.