Far from the centre: what the 2022 Census shows about the periphery of Campinas

In 2002, Racionais MC’s released Nada como um dia após o outro dia, a double album. The last track of the second disc, “Ri depois”, is “Da Ponte pra Cá”, by Mano Brown.

The bridge is João Dias, over the Pinheiros river, which leads from Santo Amaro to Jardim São Luiz, Capão Redondo, and Campo Limpo, in the southern zone of São Paulo. Brown himself names the bridge in a 2000 text from the book Capão Pecado, by Ferréz, as historian Antonio Eleilson Leite showed in a 2013 essay for Ação Educativa.

The song is about belonging: the southern zone periphery seen from the inside, with its own code and pride in the place. The expression became a way of saying periphery, in rap and in peripheral literature of São Paulo. And Leite notes that the bridge is a symbol, not a ruler. If it were just geography, this side would also include the Centro Empresarial and the upper-middle class that settled on this very side. The expression points far beyond there, far from corporate headquarters.

The connection between Rodovia dos Bandeirantes (SP-348) and Campo Grande is made mainly by the overpass on Avenida John Boyd Dunlop, around km 95 of the highway. That is where Campo Grande begins: on IBGE maps, the bridge is on the border between Campinas and Campo Grande, 6.7 km from Estação Cultura, in the Centre, in a straight line. Campo Grande is the district where Casa Hacker was born.

This research measures the border another way: by the distance from each piece of the city to the centre and, as the numbers will show, by direction. Every periphery has its bridge. Campo Grande’s passes over Bandeirantes, at km 95.

The full study is at casahacker.org/pesquisas/campinas-censo-2022: the interactive map, the charts, the method, the glossary and the data to download.

from the district to the whole city

On September 10, we published the research on Campo Grande. It read the district tract by tract. Here, the same method applies to the whole city.

These are the 2,592 census tracts of Campinas, pieces of territory small enough for a census taker to walk through. The tracts were named as neighbourhoods by the National Address Register for Statistical Purposes (CNEFE), the Census’s own address list: there are 550 neighbourhoods. And each tract was given a distance, in a straight line, to Estação Cultura, in the Centre, the former Companhia Paulista station that became a cultural centre in 2002. In 2,533 of the 2,592 tracts, the count starts from the midpoint of the houses, rather than the middle of the polygon. The indicators come from the Census universe, the part that goes to all households.

क्रीम The research uses a 10 km cutoff: less than that is close; 10 km or more, far from the centre. It’s a methodological choice, not an official border. What Leite says about the bridge applies to the 10 km mark.

This is not the first time we’ve researched territory. In 2024, Bytes of Change listened to Parque Via Norte and Vila Olímpia with educators from the neighbourhoods themselves. That one produced data in the field; this one reads public data with care. Both trade intuition for evidence.

what changes starting at 10 km

The chart compares those who live 10 km or more from Estação Cultura with those living less than 10 km away. On the research page, the figure from centre to edge, ring by ring shows the same change kilometer by kilometer, in 1 km rings around Estação Cultura.

The median income of the person answering for the household is R$ 2.567 far from the centre, compared to R$ 3.791 nearby: 32% less. The Black or brown population goes from 34.2% to 51.6%, and those living in a favela or urban community from 8.9% to 20.7%.

The edge is also younger. Far from the centre, 20.1% of people are up to 14 years old; nearby, 15.3%. People aged 70 or over are 5.4% far and 9.6% close. Daycare, school, and youth education proportionally have more public on the edge. The edge is where the city is being born.

In sanitation, one thing arrived and the other didn’t. Trash collection reaches 99.8% of households and barely follows distance (ρ = −0.13). Spearman’s ρ (“rho”) goes from −1 to +1 and measures whether two things go up and down together, tract by tract; close to zero, they don’t move together. On the other hand, piped sewage serves 97.1% of households less than 5 km from the centre and 71.3% at 15 km or more, where 54,522 people live. In this range, 18.1% of households use rudimentary cesspools, open ditches or streams, or have no bathroom. Trash reached everyone; sewage did not.

And healthcare is further away for those who already live far: in a straight line, the nearest health facility is, on average, 0.71 km away for those living 10 km or more, and 0.42 km for those living nearby. Of everything the research measured, this is what most closely tracks distance (ρ = +0.56).

direction matters

If distance explained everything, measuring kilometers would be enough. It’s not enough.

Barão Geraldo and Sousas are, on average, 9.1 km and 10.4 km from the centre, with median household head incomes of R$ 5.116 and R$ 5.035. Campo Grande and Ouro Verde are 11.9 km and 11.0 km away, with R$ 1.833 and R$ 1.987. Similar distances, very different incomes: Barão Geraldo’s is 2.8 times that of Campo Grande. And Sousas is, on average, on the “far” side of the cutoff, just as Centro Empresarial is on this side of the bridge.

Tract by tract, the strongest relationship the research measured doesn’t even involve distance. It’s between income and race/colour: the higher the tract’s income, the lower the proportion of Black or brown people (ρ = −0.90). With distance, the two move together much less (ρ of −0.49 and +0.54). The territory separates by income and race; distance is one of the forms of this separation.

Averages also hide things. The Gini index of income among tracts is 0.37, on a scale from zero (everyone equal) to 1 (all income in a single tract). And the most unequal bracket is neither the centre nor the edge: it’s the 6 to 8 km range. There, one-tenth of the population lives in tracts with a median income of up to R$ 1.600, and another tenth in tracts with R$ 10.000 or more. Distance is a lens, not an explanation.

campo grande starts at the bridge

From the bridge onward, the 242 tracts with residents in Campo Grande are between 7.05 and 17.95 km from Estação Cultura. 125,037 people live there, 11.0% of Campinas. Of these, 90,318, or 72.2%, are 10 km or more from the centre. Alone, the district accounts for 27.0% of all people living far from the centre in the city.

Among the seven districts, Campo Grande has the lowest median income for the person answering for the household (R$ 1.833), the highest share of Black or brown people (57.8%), and the highest share of those living in favelas or urban communities (16.3%). This series of researches started with it.

The bridge is 6.7 km from the centre. On the other side of it, there are people living almost 18 km away.

internet: what’s missing isn’t cable

The 2022 Census asks a single question about connectivity: whether the household has internet access. In Campinas, 92.0% do. In the city’s 35 weighting areas, the smallest area for which the Census sample yields reliable results, access ranges from 79.8% to 97.7%. And it tracks income (ρ = +0.68) more than distance (ρ = −0.42): the areas with the least access are those with lower income which, at the same time, are far away.

The number measures the gateway, not usage capacity. A prepaid cell phone and a home with fiber and a computer count the same. What is missing is not cable. It is income.

what this research doesn’t measure

Good data comes with a label:

• 10 km is a methodological cutoff, not an official border. And a straight line is not travel time: transportation was not measured.
• Income is that of the person answering for the household. In a group of tracts, it is the average of the tracts’ medians, weighted by population, and not the income of each individual.
• A CNEFE neighbourhood is not an official border. It’s the name that dominates the addresses of the tract. 16 tracts were left without a neighbourhood because neighbors were split, and the City Hall’s division was not verified.
• The registry does not separate public from private. Distance goes to the nearest health facility, of any kind.
• Internet comes from the Census sample, and the margin of error for the 35 areas was not calculated.
• Correlation is not causation. ρ says that two things move together on the map, not why.

why this has everything to do with our mission

The research is open: data by tract and neighbourhood is in CSV, under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license, and the method is described step by step on the page. Anyone can check the math. And they should. Open data is data that can be contested.

The 56 neighbourhoods 10 km or more away with 2,000 inhabitants or more are measured one by one; the 15 most populous total 112,095 people. You can choose where to start based on criteria rather than convenience, and measure later if it worked. It is with this reading that Casa Hacker wants to decide where to operate. This is the portrait of 2022, recorded with a method so that the next Census can tell what has changed.

In our manifesto, we commit to treating technology as a right and as a language of power, not as a privilege for the few. Reading the Census from the periphery is this commitment applied to public data. When Casa Hacker is born, there is a simultaneous certainty that peripheries are not a place of waiting — they are a place of beginnings. And a place of beginnings needs to be on the map.

references

CASA HACKER. Longe do centro: a periferia de Campinas no Censo Demográfico 2022. 1st edition. Campinas: Casa Hacker, September 2026. Available at: casahacker.org/pesquisas/campinas-censo-2022.

GABRIELE, Layne; BARROS, Geraldo; JANSEN, Carolina. Bytes de Mudanças: pesquisa de território em inclusão digital. Campinas: Associação Casa Hacker; Instituto Semear, 2024. Available at casahacker.org/publicacoes/bytes-de-mudanca-livro-digital.

LEITE, Antonio Eleilson. Essay on the rap “Da Ponte pra Cá”, by Racionais MC’s, in three parts: first, second, and third. Ação Educativa, Apr. 25 and 26, 2013. Accessed on: Sept. 29, 2026.

POZZER, Guilherme Pinheiro. Arqueologia e patrimônio industrial: a Estação Cultura em Campinas. In: SIMPÓSIO NACIONAL DE HISTÓRIA, 23., 2005, Londrina. Anais […]. Londrina: ANPUH, 2005. Available at: anpuh.org.br. Accessed on: Sept. 29, 2026.

RACIONAIS MC’S. Da Ponte pra Cá. In: RACIONAIS MC’S. Nada como um dia após o outro dia. [S. l.]: Cosa Nostra Fonográfica, 2002. 2 CDs. Disc 2, “Ri depois”, last track. Available on the group’s official YouTube channel.

IBGE data (2022 Demographic Census, aggregated by census tracts, and CNEFE); location of Estação Cultura, the bridge, and the highway: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL license); data processing and transformation: Casa Hacker. The analyses, interpretations, and conclusions are the sole responsibility of the signatories and do not represent the official position of IBGE.