Recognizing Social Variables affecting on the sense of identity in the neighborhoods of Iranian - Islamic Cities- Case Study: Shanbedi Neighborhood, Bushehr

Identity has become one of the most fundamental and important issues in people’s various areas of life in today's society, especially in countries like Iran has in the contemporary era. It seems that people who live in the modern society have multiple identities that should be recognized well. Identity of a place is one of the aspects understood as a way of communication between people and places through culture, history, collective memory, the type and nature of technology, performances, signs, forms and symbols of the city and visual and physical features. In this study, one of the categories of place identity, identity in the neighborhoods of Iran’s cities, was investigated. Existence of neighborhoods in the structure of historical cities in Iran, as a key element of the body of the city, balanced social life in cities. Neighborhoods as places of human life not only could affect the environment, but also improved the quality of social life. Hence, the aim of this study is to recognize the social variables affecting the identity of the neighborhoods of Islamic-Iranian’s cities. In this study both qualitative and quantitative methods were used. To do so, at first the concept of identity was identified through the studies of documents of experts’ ideas and social variables affecting identity were extracted. Then, the variables identified by questionnaires and random sampling among 100 residents of the neighborhood of Shanbedi in Bushehr were evaluated and reviewed. The results of the evaluation and analysis of factor analysis and Pearson correlation, which was used as a statistical method in this research, indicated that there is a strong, significant and meaningful relationship between the variables of sense of belonging, peace and image of identity and each of the factors with different effectiveness affects the idea of neighborhoods and peace had the strongest correlation with identity. Furthermore, the criterion of security is a variable which had a moderate and significant correlation with identity.