To start by locating myself in time and place: I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA) in 1958. I have been living in Amsterdam since 1983.
There is a great literary tradition of worshiping the place where one spent one's youth, but it is a sentiment, I am afraid, to which I am entirely foreign. The quiet, leafy residential neighborhood of my early years is still there, but most of the people I knew are not, and the cultural locus of the community, Harvard Square, seems so radically different that it seems now much more foreign to me than the Leidseplein.
So, like so many rootless Americans, I blithely exchanged one home for another, changing continents like changing a shirt, and now I live in Europe, where there is a deeper regard and more profound attachment to place and communal space, engendered, I think, by a higher regard for tradition and the antiquity of the surroundings. So, too, I have become attached to where I live: the quirky neighborhood of Oudwest, a late 19C extension to the old city center, near enough to the Binnenstad to be able to walk everywhere, just far enough removed to offer a little peace and quiet. Across the street are the grounds of former Wilhemina Gasthuis, a hospital, its stately Victorian-era buildings now studios, offices, and homes. A block or so away is the Vondelpark, the closest thing we city-dwellers have to nature, a haven for escaped parrots, rollerbladers, dogs & and their owners, and a whole lot more.