A series of events and interventions was hosted by major cultural institutions, neighbourhood-based NGOs, and independent alternative spaces, crossing over into the border zone itself by the Tijuana River. The field of operations, represented by collectives of architects and urbanists, traces an invisible trajectory across a political divide along which emergent Latin American practices of intervention simultaneously engage the politics of the environment and policies that are shaping contemporary cities. By understanding global warming as a cultural crisis rather than an environmental crisis they tried to reengage the public and the meaning of research to promote and foster a renewed politics of environmental activism. An example of this is the way building materials migrate and are recycled across the region.

The Political Equator II evolved out of Teddy Cruz's work at the San Diego-Tijuana border to expose conflict as an operational instrument to redefine architectural practice. This territory is seen as a laboratory within which to reflect on current territorial politics of migration, labour and surveillance, the tensions between sprawl and density, formal and informal urbanisms and the division between enclaves of wealth and sectors of poverty. The ongoing project will research a more meaningful socio-political and economic role for architecture, suggesting that no advances in environmental sustainability and building design can occur without reorganising existing political structures, economic resources and social capital in neighbourhoods worldwide.