The urban geography and political ecology disciples have been strong allies in the politicisation of water struggles and collective pursue of water emancipation projects (Swyngedouw, 2004). However, the literature still lacks deeper engagement with the grassroots projects to examine their relationship with structures of governance and their role in the co-creation of waterscapes. The motivations and transformative capacities of individuals mobilised in grassroots strategies is a topic that can be further unpacked when discussed from radical ethics of care frameworks (Power, 2019). In this paper I draw from study cases with an Indigenous and a Riverine community from Sao Paulo, Brazil to further examine critical dimensions of care within the governance of urban waterscapes. Centring on grassroots practices for mobilization of excluded communities and regeneration of water environments in the peripherical urban landscape, I will discuss how care participates in the modern hydrosocial assemblage to produce, challenge, and reduce socioecological inequalities and injustices. This discussion brings light to the careless and negligent practices of urban development and governance failing to provide communities of the city’s peripheries with safe, healthy, and thriving environments. Comparatively, I emphasise how local leaderships and activists continuously work through solidarity networks to expose and dissolve the underpins of exclusionary and anthropocentric urban progress, performing a variety of care labour towards the people and more-than-human entities in most vulnerability within their communities. While the experience of grassroot activism offers critical and creative insights on how urban governance practices could be reframed to nurture cities caring-with water, it also reveals the uneven burdens and risks that activists face when performing their work. Based on learnings from grassroots actors of marginalised urban contexts, this paper situates possible entanglements of water, local communities, Indigeneity, and urban justice in practices of coexistence, collaboration and complicity that can enable more caring waterscapes.