Sera Tolgay

2016 - 2018

Alumni

Legatum Fellow

From:

Turkey

Sector:

IT/Telecom

Location:

Turkey

Degree:

SM, School of Architecture & Planning

Sera founded the Critical Cartography and Restoration Project as an interdisciplinary initiative to bring together insights from geospatial science and remote sensing to support climate adaptation, ecological restoration, and community-led climate action projects in cities. CCRP uses an evidence-based, inclusive research process working with communities on the ground to map the unmapped and shape how our cities and landscapes can respond to a changing climate. Sera led a team of designers and developers to launch award-winning open data and civic engagement tool “muhit” which crowdsourced data to identify catalytic projects for climate action and quality of life in metropolitan areas. After being launched in 2015 in Istanbul, the tool is used by local governments in more than 8 cities throughout Turkey. In addition to the MIT Legatum Center, her work has been supported by TechSoup Europe, Community Volunteers Foundation, MIT Global IDEAS Competition, and the Dutch Government’s Creative Industries Fund.

Specializing in resilience planning and climate adaptation projects, Sera is a Senior Designer at Scape Studio, and has previously worked as an urban designer at WSP and the New York City Department of City Planning. Her urban design projects range from city-scale masterplans for coastal resiliency to the adaptive reuse of infrastructure. Sera has also worked as an independent consultant to the World Bank on urban regeneration and resiliency projects in Cyprus and Turkey and as a researcher at MIT’s Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism on disaster-resilient housing and urban design guidelines. Prior to her studies at MIT, Sera worked on the pedestrianization of Istanbul’s Historic Peninsula at WRI’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities (formerly EMBARQ) in collaboration with Gehl Architects. Sera has a dual degree in Master of City Planning and Master of Science in Architecture Studies in the Aga Khan Program from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and received her B.A. from Yale University.