Constructing metric spaces from systems of walls

Abstract

We give a general procedure for constructing metric spaces from systems of partitions. This generalises and provides analogues of Sageev's construction of dual CAT(0) cube complexes for the settings of hyperbolic and injective metric spaces. As applications, we produce a ``universal'' hyperbolic action for groups with strongly contracting elements, and show that many groups with ``coarsely cubical'' features admit geometric actions on injective metric spaces. In an appendix with Davide Spriano, we show that a large class of groups have an infinite-dimensional space of quasimorphisms.