Limited access to drinking water persists and continues to intensify the struggle for water and aggravate the urban crisis in southern cities such as Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Mumbai, Delhi, and even Lima. This urban crisis is instigated by the inability of infrastructures to satisfy the ever-growing population, creating a fragmented system with most resident out of the areas covered by the grid. Here, low-income residential areas are generally the most affected. As a result, citizens are resorting to certain practices, most of which are informal and risky, such as depending on informal water vendors (bottles and sachets of water of doubtful sources) as their mode of water supply, others establish their own boreholes and wells without respecting standards. To add, some reasons point to a limited technical and financial framework, there are also purely sociopolitical motives for the marginalization or exclusion of city dwellers or communities from the public drinking water network. To solve this problem, communities and researchers have explored participatory mapping as a means of narrowing the gaps in water scarcity. This citizen-based approach enables communities and individuals to express their feelings and document their lived experiences of the struggle for water, not only exposing the limitations of the formal water system but also proposing avenues for improvement. This chapter aims to highlight access to water as one of the major social phenomena of developing urban territories. It is divided into three main sections: the first highlights the sharp increase in demand for water, the second looks at the origin and operationalization of alternative means such as boreholes and wells, and the third defines or presents participatory mapping as a possible remediation tool for revealing governance gaps, improving and promoting local knowledge and responsiveness to this water crisis. This framing positions the water crisis as one that can be reflected in questions of justice, rights and civic belonging and not always from the typical political and technical dimensions, but as a social aspect that should be considered in water management debates to ensure equitable and sustainable response.