I SAT with my ward colleague Jon in the Marble Arch on Rochdale Road and listened. The very nice, very thoughtful people around me lived in the tumble of renovation and new build developments that had sprung up around Angel Meadow, a place once both home to some of the monuments of the co-operative movement, and an Irish slum Friedrich Engels termed “Hell on Earth.”

I often wonder whether, when flogging flats in the Far East, the slick, multilingual video realtors mention that the angels of this meadow are the children who died in the sort of squalor we can’t imagine. I also wonder whether they know that there are no red squirrels in the park — the ones on the corporate identity brochures must be day-trippers from Formby.

Still, as the group of young people clustered around my table sat and sipped the very decent beer, the echoes came through.

The absent and uncaring landlords. The shoddy constructions by shoddier building firms. The leaks. The drafts. The thefts. The shit on the streets. The constant turnover of people in and out that made any attempt at building an alternative seem ephemeral.

The sense of people who had come here from somewhere else to make a better life, sucked in by the promise and been, somehow, disappointed. The half of your take-home pay spent each month for the privilege. Something being expensive doesn’t make it luxury.

“I’m sure this sounds very privileged,” says Matt, as he talks about his windows that don’t keep the rain out, “I know there’s real poverty elsewhere in the city.”

I realise at 35 I’m the oldest person at the table, and how low the demands of this group, the new workers of Manchester, actually are. Someone asks if the council could give them some pickers so they could collect the rubbish outside their flat. I wonder what demand someone in the same council tax band would make on a leafy street in the south of the city.

I excuse myself and walk to the gents. Standing there a voice asks me how I am. “All the better for hearing a Manc accent,” I say. I fall into a conversation with the lad. Tyson, 24, a scaffolder from Monsall, Irish Catholic and a grandad from Jamaica.

For those unaware of the geography of Manchester, were you to walk from the city centre, through Collyhurst, to Monsall Street, life expectancy would drop about seven years. On average, men don’t see 70.

He asks where I’m from. I tell him my family have been here in this city for 150 years and list off the places; Cambridge Street, Skerry Close, Bincolm Walk. I lay my credentials down as, fundamentally, from here. He gets it.

We talk; about gentrification, about socialism, about Christianity. I tell him he should be in a union, being in construction. He tells me he doesn’t need to rely on anyone else but, keen to not just fob me off, asks for a reading recommendation, taking out his phone to write it down. I say The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell. “Wait, like a tressell table?” Yes.

I walk back from the bar, chatting with a lad, Dan, who’s running a Dungeons and Dragons game later that evening. Dan is slightly disdainful that I always play paladins.

There are three comic book shops in my ward, living avatars of the perpetual adolescence that emerges, along with eternal roommates and burgers with lucky charms on them, from a whole cohort of people who can’t or won’t meet the markers of adulthood erected by previous generations.

I give my line that “city centre living” is just straight people living the way gay people have lived for 50 years.

I spot Tyson walking through the room on his way to the smoking area. He hails me and hugs me and asks if I want a smoke. I decline, saying my mum would kill me. He’s misplaced his lighter and I don’t have one on me. He tucks a cig behind his ear and goes rounds the tables. He, very politely, asks each group if they have a lighter.

He’s as tall as I am at six-foot-two and has hands that look like they could sculpt rock. And I see in each group a flicker, a visceral moment of panic, as he approaches them. Their subsequent, high-pitched, fumbling, over-apologetic response.

Half a dozen tables. None have a lighter. Maybe it’s a win for public health. I follow him outside where he finds a fellow smoker. We talk loudly about Alexander the Great and the definition of masculinity. He hugs me again and says he doesn’t usually get to have these conversations.

As I go back to my table a very smart, very well-spoken young woman comes up to me and asks if I was talking to that guy outside. I say yes. “Oh I do feel for you,” she says genuinely. She reads me as one of hers. As safe. I try not to let it bother me.

Jon and I leave with our casework, a list of people to pester at the town hall. We walk away from that liminal space and back towards the city centre, along the border with Ancoats where all the cool kids live. A lot has been written about the change in Manchester, and a lot more will be.

These current waves of people, fleeing from whatever god-forsaken Sussex village they felt stifled in to pursue love or learning, both change and challenge a city which, simultaneous with being their oasis, has had areas of poverty resist all cures since Joseph Rowntree was still spending his own money.

I do not know, even as an avid watcher of my city, how it will turn out. But I know that for all the people who speculate, in the property press or on shiny Instagram feeds, they’re looking at the wrong aspect.

Buildings come and buildings go. Politicians win and lose. But regardless of the plans of any market-stall Robert Moses, it is fundamentally here, at the meeting places of people, where they rub up against each other, where they talk of what brought and keeps them here, that the true identity of the city is constantly made and remade. For what is the city but the people?