Urban Tales Lab is a Research Platform investigating innovative narrative methods for urban spaces. Urban Tales Lab has been founded by Dr Carla Molinari and Dr Marco Spada.

Carla Molinari is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and BA Course Leader at Anglia Ruskin University. She is an ARB registered architect who teaches architectural history and theory and design studio. Carla has a PhD in Architecture (University Sapienza of Rome) and has published on cinema and architecture, the conception of architectural space, and cultural regeneration. Before joining ARU in 2022, she taught at Leeds Beckett University, The University of Gloucestershire, The University of Liverpool, and University Sapienza of Rome. Molinari’s research engages with architecture and media, innovative interpretations of cinematic design methods, theory and history of space, and urban narrative strategies. Her awards include a British Academy Fellowship by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei for her research on Peter Greenaway and Sergei Eisenstein (2016) and a Paul Mellon Research Support Grant for her archival research on Gordon Cullen (2020).

Marco Spada is Lecturer in Architecture at University of Suffolk in Ipswich; he is an architect (ARB registered) and urban planner. He holds a PhD in Architecture (University Sapienza of Rome), with a thesis on industrial landscapes. He was previously Honorary Associate at the Department of Geography and Planning of The University of Liverpool, where he studied the implications of post-industrial regeneration dynamics on the built environment. He is one of the founding partners of UrbanTalesLab, a creative research platform specialized in urban narrative. Spada’s research focuses on the relationship between the history of the urban fabric and micro-narratives, with a particular interest in productive landscape and industrial towns. He has recently published articles on Ted Cullinan (2022), the Church of St Ignatius in Rome (2022) and the monograph Industryscape (2018), a book about mega-factories and the potentialities of urban narrative as recovery strategy.