As we enter 2060, the Ministry of Just Transition is proud to present this commemorative wall calendar to celebrate our achievements across the world. This publication encapsulates the decommissioning and repurposing of twenty infrastructure sites that once belonged to Shell, one of the 20th-century carbon majors.

The Ministry was established in the immediate aftermath of a truly watershed event: the bankruptcy declaration and subsequent public takeover of Shell. Since then, the “After Shell” programme has swiftly become the cornerstone of the Ministry’s mission, tasked with facilitating the community-led, justice-based, and people-powered sunsetting of Shell’s legacy infrastructure, assets, and impacts.

To compile these annals spanning four decades of Just Transition, spatial designers from what used to be the Netherlands were invited by the Ministry to recapitulate their accounts as witnesses and contributors to the dissolution of the carbon major. May their work inspire the next generation of eco-social designers.

In July 2022, a 8-day summer school for 90 students of architecture, urbanism and landscape design was convened at the Academy of Architecture Amsterdam. Entitled After Shell, it was intended as an encounter between climate justice organisers and spatial design professionals to build bridges for a just transition.

The students were first initiated to climate justice by an all-women team of grassroots movement leaders. They displayed a frank, confrontational attitude that pushed the students out of their comfort zones. After a two-day crash course, groups of students were assigned a piece of (Royal Dutch) Shell infrastructure (offices, refineries, pipelines, oil rigs), each site marked by a history of depletion, disaster or injustice. The students were then asked to imagine scenarios for the rapid, responsible and justice-based decommissioning and repurposing of these environmental conflict and sacrifice zones. Rather than of proposing a singular designerly gesture frozen in time, each assignment day fast-forwarded ten years, capturing different stages of the transition over the coming decades. The event culminated in a performative finale, held in the former Shell office canteen, where the groups presented their work in the form of storytelling from preferred futures.

This gathering was a provocation and an invitation to spatial designers: Do you have what it takes to design for the eco-social transitions ahead? Are you capable of letting go of eco-modernist, solutionist, techno-fix ideologies? Can you put our skills and privilege at the service of the most affected communities? The outcome was compiled in a weighty wall calendar spanning four decades, from 2020 to 2060. Each page features an image and a caption, a daily reminder of our generation’s task: a necessary, overdue and inevitable just transition. Copies of the calendar have been sent to the Prime Minister of the Netherlands and the CEO of Shell.

AIR Programme and Winter School
The artist-in-residency of Selçuk Balamir is a cooperation between the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture and the AIR programme of the Amsterdam University of the Arts. The Amsterdam University of the Arts invites the Artist in Residence to inspire students and teachers by confronting them with topical developments and issues from the arts practice. These tailor-made AIR programmes focus on innovation and connection in an international and multidisciplinary context. Led by an Artist in Residence, the annual Winter School supplements the main study programme at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. Students learn to work on a design assignment as a team during an intensive workshop.