Dissolving the concrete: reconfiguring urban waterscapes through grassroots activism in São Paulo, Brazil

This research investigates how the disruptive actions of grassroots initiatives are challenging and reshaping urban waterscapes – the dialectical and relational ways that urban society relates with water. Drawing from political ecologies of water (PEW) and feminist ethics of care, the research focuses on a case study of São Paulo, Brazil. This urban mega-centre in the periphery of capitalism has experienced both catastrophic floods and water shortages, compounded by a lack of universal sanitation, speculative urban development, and the political and spatial marginalisation of many of its citizens. I mobilise waterscapes as the conceptual framing in my research to evidence the power asymmetries and spatialities in the co-production of water and the hydrosocial relations it entangles, highlighting the contribution brought by grassroots activism to envision emancipation of marginalised communities. I complement this framework with contemporary contributions from critical geographies of care, intersecting waterscapes with care collectives and caring-with to further foreground grassroots activism as infrastructures of care transforming shadow waterscapes. I examine these issues, investigating how, in what ways and to what effect, grassroots community initiatives are reshaping unequal waterscapes, based on two case studies: (1) Riverine communities of Tietê’s floodplain, showing hydrosocial inequalities perpetrated by traditional governance systems on informal urban waterscapes; and (2) the Indigenous Guarani Mbya community of Jaraguá, illustrating Indigenous ways of resistance and regeneration from colonial logics of dominance over land, people and water. This thesis emerged from an action research design informed by ethnography principles to explore avenues of positive socio-ecological impact for the communities participating in the study. Through a mix of qualitative methods developed during the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked with digital tools to share the narratives of these communities and to explore and expose the critical dimensions of care within alternative governances of urban waterscapes. Centring on grassroots practices for the mobilisation of excluded groups and the regeneration of water environments in the urban landscape of São Paulo, I argue that greater attentiveness is needed upon care ethics and its infrastructures in the modern hydrosocial assemblage that work to produce, challenge, and reduce socioecological inequalities and injustices at multiple scales. Concomitantly, this thesis brings to light the care-less and negligent practices of urban development and governance, which fail to provide communities dwelling in the city’s peripheries with safe, healthy, and thriving environments. I emphasise how local leadership and activist collectives continuously mobilise through grassroots activism, a politics of resistance, and alternative regenerative practices, in order to expose and dissolve exclusionary and anthropocentric urban progress. I discuss how these grassroots community practices are rooted in connection to place, solidarity networks, and collectivism, where the flows and materiality of urbanised water actively inform their values-led practices. Through their actions, grassroots activists perform of care labour with the people and more-than-human entities that are most vulnerable 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 that care with water, it also reveals the uneven burdens and risks that activists face when performing their work. This thesis proposes a reflection on what systems of co-governance could offer to empower transformative actions led by grassroot actors in marginalised contexts to enable the flourishing of more caring waterscapes based on shared experiences and learning cycles.