During the “hunger winter” of 1944 in Amsterdam, over 20,000 people died of starvation. Many of the city’s trees were cut down, and the interiors of abandoned buildings broken up for fuel. When peace came this once most beautiful and urbane of cities was in urgent need of large-scale reconstruction. In the years following the end of World War II in Europe, modern architecture had an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate a socially minded, urban style. The consensus today is that in most places it failed. The young Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck was one of the earliest critics of the mechanistic approach taken by his modernist colleagues to urban reconstruction. The failure of architecture and planning to recreate forms of urban community and solidarity has become a problem in post-war Europe, as so many acclaimed housing estates, new towns, or newly designed urban quarters, around Europe, have been troubled by vandalism, disrepair and abandonment. Van Eyck saw this coming. In 1947 at the age of 28, he went to work for the Office for Public Works in Amsterdam and, as his first project, built a small playground. This was in line with his belief that by promoting and shaping the daily “encounter” or “inbetween-ness” of social space, architecture could humanize cities and create public trust.