Pursuing Lax Diagrams and Enrichment

Abstract

This paper is part of a project that aims to give a homotopy cousin of Kelly's treatment of enriched category theory. After introducing unital co-Segal M-categories, we establish the unital version of a previous theorem that was proven for the nonunital ones; but this was done under strong hypothesis. We've removed here these assumptions and try to keep the hypothesis on M as minimal as possible. Our main result provides a sort of Bousfield localization of a model category that is not known to be left proper. In this model structure, every co-Segal M-category is `canonically' equivalent to a strict M-category with the same set of objects. We revisit some constructions of classical enriched category theory to set up the necessary material for our future applications.