City Conditions and Subdivisions
Canoas ("Canoes" in English) consists of mostly large sprawling neighborhoods and a lively business district, as well as numerous large factories, among them the Refinaria Alberto Pasqualini (REFAP), a Petrobras oil refinery. In addition, a new high-end district is gradually emerging in the suburbs. As happens with many Brazilian cities, there can arguably be seen two different countries in the same municipality: it does not take too long for one to drive from an impoverished slum to a well-off neighbourhood.
The city's poorest neighbourhoods are completely unplanned. The Guajuviras subdivision, the old Guajuviras Farm that was developed by the government, was originally settled by squatters before the government officially opened the property for inhabitation. Poorer favelas or slums fill some of the forest or green space areas in the subdivision).
Canoas has one of the richest and most important universities in southern Brazil: the Ulbra (Lutheran University of Brazil), as well as UnilaSalle and Centro Universitário Ritter dos Reis. The enormous wealth, manifest in the Ulbra, and crushing poverty, manifest in the slums of the city, are characteristic of the economic divide of Brazil. Many wealthy citizens in Canoas and the greater Porto Alegre metropolitan area fail to acknowledge the existence of poverty in their cities and most have never walked through the slums of their own cities.
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