Cee Bee project visits the CB1 development in Cambridge to explore the changing identity of this urban area and how the collective perceptions of the ‘new city’ are shaped and constructed. The focus is on a cluster of the urban residential properties that have recently been completed by the developers. The project portrays the ‘shifting phase’ in the life of this ‘new city quarter’ and questions what has been gained and lost.

There are 12 images starting with the promise of the ‘new city’ and progressing to what the developers delivered: the identical beehive-like dwellings defining the standard of the modern urban living with the small measures of nature trapped inside cages and stone borders here and there, the kind of landscape that Dan Holdsworth described as “A Machine for Living” (Alexander, 2015:178).

See Bee series highlights the two-way relationship between people and a place and shows that when the meaning of the place changes, “it is our conceptions of ourselves that change through a process of negotiating new symbols and meanings.” (Greider and Garkovich, 1994). The series acknowledges the growing geographies of disparity in the city and poses a wider question concerning the ‘new cities’ and whether “their lack of identity, individuality, and ubiquity limits their status to “spaces” or the even bleaker sounding “non-places” (Alexander, 2015:178).