Child friendly city scholarship has been largely shaped by Global North experiences and frameworks, where formal public spaces and structured processes determine children’s participation in the public sphere. In contrast, children in many cities of the Global South experience urban life very differently. Informal streets, limited play spaces, unequal access to resources and exposure to environmental risks such as heat, flooding and pollution shape their everyday lives. At the same time, framing cities through a simple Global North - Global South divide can risk treating children’s experiences within these contexts as homogenous, overlooking how micro-geographies and local inequalities within cities shape urban encounters and consequently children’s wellbeing. And yet such nuances remain under-explored in the child friendly city discourse. This presentation draws on child-centred co-design projects in Dhaka (Bangladesh), Campo Grande (Brazil), Cardiff (Wales) and Poznań (Poland) to bring diverse contexts into critical dialogue. Using creative participatory methods- mapping, drawing, walk along interviews, and model-making, the research foregrounds children’s perceptions, spatial practices and future imaginaries. Framed through the concepts of ‘just city’ and ‘infrastructures of care’, the presentation argues for a context-sensitive, relational and justice-oriented approach to child-friendly urbanism. It moves beyond universalised Global North models to recognise informality, inequality, and climate vulnerability as central to children’s lived realities, and rethinks child-friendly urbanism as a pathway to support children’s wellbeing in rapidly urbanising contexts.