Lately I’ve been seeing online ads promoting luxury tourism in Istanbul, touting the city as embodying the “new cool.” The ads gloss over the fact that the capital is undergoing unsustainable rates of urban sprawl to prop up Turkey’s flailing national economy. Overdevelopment is a problem everywhere, but it proves particularly damaging for a city with such a multilayered and diverse cultural and natural heritage. Photographer Serkan Taycan’s exhibition “Towards the City” addressed these ecological concerns with four interrelated series of works dating from the past fifteen years. While three of