In this paper we examine the work and place of care within the governance of unequal urban waterscapes, drawing from case studies with an Indigenous and a riverine community in São Paulo, Brazil. Centring on grassroots activist practices and the regeneration of water environments in the urban periphery, we consider how care infrastructures participate in the modern hydrosocial assemblage to produce, challenge, and reduce socioecological inequalities and injustices. This paper brings to light the careless practices of urban development and governance within the São Paulo context that fail to provide safe, healthy, and thriving environments. We argue that solidarity, collectivism, and connection to place are core constituents and drivers of grassroots modes of action that seek to resist these processes of neglect. Within experiences of resistance and reimagination of uneven waterscapes, the materiality and agency of water are crucial factors shaping the mobilisation of excluded local communities. The paper offers insights into how care flows with, and is transformed by, contested urban waterscapes, amidst the entanglements of water politics and ecologies in diverse contexts.
Faustino et al. (Sun,) studied this question.