Taksim Gezi

 

Istanbul.

In the spring of 2013. 

Eight people died and thousands were injured in protests stemming from the proposed paving - over of one of the last parks in the city, Taksim Gezi. Over 2 million of the region’s trees had already been cut down to make way for a new airport and a new bridge over the Bosphorus Strait.

Taksim Gezi became a figure not only of the importance of nature to city life, but to democracy itself, as Frederick Law Olmsted wrote “A sense of enlarged freedom is to all, at all times, the most certain and the most valuable gratification afforded by a park.”