The main goal of this paper is to construct universal spaces for asymptotic dimension by generalizing to the coarse context an approach to constructing universal spaces for covering dimension using a factorization result due to Mardesic.

We use a coarse version of the fundamental group first introduced by Barcelo, Kramer, Laubenbacher and Weaver to show that box spaces of finitely presented groups detect the normal subgroups used to construct the box space, up to isomorphism. As a consequence, we have that two finitely presented groups admit coarsely equivalent box spaces if and only if they are commensurable via normal subgroups. We also provide an example of two filtrations (Ni) and (Mi) of a free group F such that Mi > Ni for all i with [Mi:Ni] uniformly bounded, but with $\squ _{(N_i)}F$ not coarsely equivalent to $\squ _{(M_i)}F$. Finally, we give some applications of the main theorem for rank gradient and the first ℓ2 Betti number, and show that the main theorem can be used to construct infinitely many coarse equivalence classes of box spaces with various properties.

We extend Følner’s amenability criterion to the realm of general topological groups. Building on this, we show that a topological group $G$ is amenable if and only if its left-translation action can be approximated in a uniform manner by amenable actions on the set  $G$ . As applications we obtain a topological version of Whyte’s geometric solution to the von Neumann problem and give an affirmative answer to a question posed by Rosendal.

This paper is devoted to dualization of paracompactness to the coarse category via the concept of $R$-disjointness. Property A of Yu can be seen as a coarse variant of amenability via partitions of unity and leads to a dualization of paracompactness via partitions of unity. On the other hand, finite decomposition complexity of Guentner, Tessera, and Yu and straight finite decomposition complexity of Dranishnikov and Zarichnyi employ $R$-disjointness as the main concept. We generalize both concepts to that of countable asymptotic dimension and our main result shows that it is a subclass of spaces with Property A. In addition, it gives a necessary and sufficient condition for spaces of countable asymptotic dimension to be of finite asymptotic dimension.

Let $\mathbf{TB}$ be the category of totally bounded, locally compact metric spaces with the ${{C}_{0}}$ coarse structures. We show that if $X$ and $Y$ are in $\mathbf{TB}$, then $X$ and $Y$ are coarsely equivalent if and only if their Higson coronas are homeomorphic. In fact, the Higson corona functor gives an equivalence of categories $\mathbf{TB}\,\to \,\mathbf{K}$, where $\mathbf{K}$ is the category of compact metrizable spaces. We use this fact to show that the continuously controlled coarse structure on a locally compact space $X$ induced by some metrizable compactification $\widetilde{X}$ is determined only by the topology of the remainder $\widetilde{X}\,\backslash \,X$.

We generalize the relative index theorem of Gromov and Lawson, using coarse geometry.

We introduce the notion of wide representation of an inverse semigroup and prove that with a suitably defined topology there is a space of germs of such a representation that has the structure of an étale groupoid. This gives an elegant description of Paterson's universal groupoid and of the translation groupoid of Skandalis, Tu and Yu. In addition, we characterize the inverse semigroups that arise from groupoids, leading to a precise bijection between the class of étale groupoids and the class of complete and infinitely distributive inverse monoids equipped with suitable representations, and we explain the sense in which quantales and localic groupoids carry a generalization of this correspondence.

We formulate and study a new coarse (co-)assembly map. It involves a modification of the Higson corona construction and produces a map dual in an appropriate sense to the standard coarse assembly map. The new assembly map is shown to be an isomorphism in many cases. For the underlying metric space of a group, the coarse co-assembly map is closely related to the existence of a dual Dirac morphism and thus to the Dirac dual Dirac method of attacking the Novikov conjecture.

The purpose of this paper is to give a detailed study of the basic theory of C*-categories. The study includes some examples of C*-categories that occur naturally in geometric applications, such as groupoid C*-categories, and C*-categories associated to structures in coarse geometry. We conclude the paper with a brief survey of Hilbert modules over C*-categories.

2000 Mathematical Subject Classification: 18D99, 46L05, 46L08.