eng Science and Education Publishing American Journal of Civil Engineering and Architecture 2328-3998 2018-08-01 6 5 180 186 10.12691/ajcea-6-5-2 AJCEA2018652 article Ola Hassane olahassane@f-eng.tanta.edu.eg 1 Ibrahim Maarouf 2 Department of Architecture, Tanta University, Tanta, Egypt Department of Architecture, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt The word identity is being used a lot nowadays and it had been extended to cover various fields. This strong word deeply affects anything that it follows, determining its unique characteristics, as describing a group of people to be English, or an interior space to be Chinese, or a city square to be French, or a town to be Greek, and even more to determine which era of time did all of them belong to, as no one may confuse an ancient Egyptian temple with a new Indian one. This paper studies the identity, to explain how it characterizes the people or the place and how does it evolve along the history and through the memory, and to understand wither if identity is a product of culture, or is it the one that produces the places' culture. http://pubs.sciepub.com/ajcea/6/5/2/ajcea-6-5-2.pdf identity heritage behavior preserved communities built environment architecture