One of the things you were doing as you wrote about your favorite place was to concern yourself with "place." You were making direct observations of a particular place and of its effect on you. In doing so, you were acting as a scientist--a psychologist, mainly.

    If you generalized about your observations of that particular place, you may have thought about how places affect us and influence our mood and behavior, usually without our even being consciously aware of it. (That's why most buildings are designed by architects, rather than by engineers--for the sake of psychology and art, and not merely to keep the rain out.)

    Now I'd like you to examine the neighborhood you live in. How does it differ from other neighborhoods or "places" you know about--especially from other places you've been or lived in? How big is it? Are its borders clear-cut, or are they indeterminate? How do you feel about your neighborhood? And how do you feel when you're there?

    One of the things you'll have to consider for this job is what you mean when you think "neighborhood." Your writing probably ought to demonstrate what you mean by that term--or what that term means to you.

    Maybe I should mention that this is another exercise in observation, something like what you did in writing about your favorite place, only on a much larger scale. In that writing, by the way, you probably recognized that you were investigating the interrelationship between place and personality. But in order to do that you had to observe carefully both your surroundings and yourself. You had to see what was really THERE. That's never easy.

    Write down your observations about your neighborhood so that the rest of us can get some sense of where you live and what the world looks like from there.  Remember to give your writing a title.
 

    "Write down your observations"--I chose those words deliberately to remind you that this is another observation job. This kind of observing is one of the things anthropologists do when they study a group or community. Later, anthropologists often report their observations as ethnographies.