This study explores how children engage with urban systems for water and transport during arts activities. The research question is: How do children make meaning of urban infrastructure in collaboration with peers and art materials? I aim to contribute to early childhood sustainability education by addressing large underlying drivers behind sustainability challenges, such as, in this case, infrastructure. Such content is often overlooked in ECE, where staff typically focus on recycling and nurturing care for nature (Ärlemalm-Hagsér & Sundberg, 2016; Meland, 2021). Herein, I adopt a socio-material perspective (Barad, 2007; Penn, 2019) to capture how meaning making emerges in intra-action between children and materials during art activities. The study follows an interpretivist paradigm, using video analysis of children sculpting road networks with clay and drawing water systems on large paper. The analysis initially focused on child-material intra-actions, then incorporated verbal data. Ethical measures included informed consent, children’s assent, and discussions with teachers to ensure inclusive participation. The findings show that children initially create networks of roads or pipelines, as expected. Then their engagement deepens and they introduce imaginative narratives, such as using “breathing pills” to move inside the water pipes. These findings show how children’s perspectives on urban infrastructure extend beyond the researcher’s initial objectives. The study contributes to ECE practice and policy by illustrating how factual and imaginative elements intertwine in children’s meaning making of complex global challenges. Moreover, it contributes to ECE research by showing how responsiveness to children’s perspectives can enrichen the knowledge generated in research.