Beaconhouse and Lahore's Middle Class

Lahore's growing suburbanization continues to pose a number of interesting questions for people with an interest in urban sociology. For starters, it's one of the most definitive markers of Lahore's ever-expanding, ever-consuming population. Secondly, it tells us about upward socio-economic mobility within the city. Thirdly, it reveals preference patterns for a number of goods like housing, retail items, food, and perhaps most interestingly, education.

Back in the 70s, when the first major wave of suburbanization was taking place (under the aegis of the Lahore Development Authority), another complementary trend rode its tail-wind: private middle to upper-middle class education. The pioneer in this field - and this goes largely uncontested - is the Beaconhouse School System, founded and run by Mrs. Nasreen Kasuri (of ex-Foreign Minister's wife fame).

The Kasuris first opened up shop in their home on Main Boulevard, Gulberg, but the first proper campus they rented out was a house in Garden Town. Now that in itself is a fairly revealing piece of information. In 1983, Beaconhouse Garden Town (which happens to be my school as well), started selling relatively affordable English medium education to families whose preferences, social capital and fiscal constraints straddled the space below English medium upper class institutions like Aitchison, but above Urdu medium institutions like government schools or Central Model.

Their decision to start in a new suburban area, as Garden Town was, proved to be quite profitable in the long run.

To understand why, one needs to get a sense of how the process of suburban development kicked off in the city. Garden Town, one of LDA's earlier projects, lies on the edge of Lahore as it was in the 1970s, and Lahore as it is now. It was one of the first middle class suburban communities, and all subsequent suburbanization has taken place to its south or south west. Having a Beaconhouse in Garden Town meant that you would be able to attract, in due time of course, kids of families who've shifted away from congested parts of the city to their new suburban homes, or kids from new middle class families migrating to Lahore from other cities in Punjab. Another equally important determinant of the success of this new enterprise was the demand for English medium education, and its perceived importance within the increasingly aware, upwardly mobile classes - something that grew steadily in the 80s and the 90s. (this in turn was because of family members migrating abroad, VCRs and 'dish culture')

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the story of Lahore's middle-class led suburbanization can be told by using a simple map that charts out where Beaconhouse eventually decided to open up subsequent
 campuses:
View Beaconhouse in a larger map

The map is fairly self-explanatory, but a few things need to be pointed out. First, there's no Beaconhouse to the north of the city because there are few middle class people living there. Secondly, they opened up their Canal Side campus in 1995 on Raiwind road when there was literally nothing around it in a 10 km radius. At that time some parents thought it was a terrible decision since nobody in their right mind would send their kids to school in the middle of nowhere.

Aforementioned parents have been busy eating humble pie for the last 10 years.

Anyway, the purpose of this post was to show how a specific class, the middle to upper middle one in this case, can be spatially identified by mapping out desired commodities - like private education (or conversely, how commodity preferences can be gauged by mapping out middle class spaces). Can't say for sure, but i suspect if one were to mark out growth in mid-range food outlets, the results would be quite similar.