This article adopts internal colonization as an interpretative framework for the analysis of resettlement practices in the 1940s and 1950s in Rotterdam, a city that had been heavily bombed during the Second World War. The use of internal colonization presents a new vista on the experiments with population management, in particular with regard to perceived social misfits, in Rotterdam. Internal colonization permits a much more critical reading than existing historiography of postwar reconstruction policies that involved the displacement and isolation of part of the urban population.