Play is a freely chosen process that is important for the overall children development. A relatively large amount of research efforts have investigated the impact of play, particularly outdoor play in natural environments, on children's play behavior and the consequent impact on their development. However, in the recent decades, modern societies have noticed an intense declination of play opportunities in outdoor spaces especially in the local everyday community urban spaces, as living streets, neighborhoods, and recreational public spaces, due to the imposed structured activities, adult supervision, and poor playing environments such as enclosed playgrounds.To date, relatively few studies have investigated children's lived experiences in their daily urban spaces, where they can play freely. Although they have their own way of perceiving, experiencing, and living the daily urban spaces, different from adults that results in creating a gap. Thus, in order to fill in the resulted gap, this study aims to investigate the potential impact of the urban transformation of daily urban spaces on children presence and their play behavioral patterns. The second objective is to explore the associations between specific spatial physical characteristics as well as functional qualities, or “spatial potentialities” that form different configurations, and children play opportunities (Breviglieri, 2014(.The study relies on a “causal comparative survey research approach” and an “intrinsic case study” (Groat & Wang, 2013). It involves the investigation of four selected urban spaces, with different spatial configuration, (recreational and residential urban functional categories), in Paris, France and Cairo, Egypt. Fieldwork is conducted through three phases, with randomly selected “middle-aged” children, between 5 to 12 years. It included structured child-centered behavioral observations complemented with behavioral qualitative observations, perceptual cognitive skill activities as drawings as well as photography, and informal interviews associated occasionally with child- led walks.Collected data is analyzed within the shadow of both “Trialectic of Space Theory” (Lefebvre, 1992) and “Affordances theories”, (Gibson, 1979, Norman 1988, Bohme, 2017), to fill in the problematic gap. This created gap is situated between the designed spaces by adult so as designers, children perceptions depending on their capabilities, cultural, social background, as well as their previous experience, and the resulted lived space with its specific ambiance adopting children’s needs and behaviors.The study strongly suggests that spatial porosity of daily urban spaces, influence children's presence and the occurrence of different play behavior types. In addition, different spatial typologies seemed to promote different play patterns that may enhance different children’s spatial perceptions and preferences. Moreover, the study identified and outlined a set of specific spatial potentialities aspects, forming different spatial configurations, which appeared to be associated to children's sensory experiences, play opportunities, and the resulted lived ambient envelop.This study tended to enable urban planners and landscape architects to extract the essential characteristics that help creating child-friendly spaces. In order to encompass children with diversity of cultures and origins from all over the world. Hereafter, it will open a new perspective in the design, by proposing a design approach and guidelines to articulate children's spaces in the city; it is not a question of thinking of these spaces, as closed islands, but rather as child-friendly environments within intergenerational cities.“A city where the child would be the prince and the father of Man” (Aillaud, 1972).