Lipschitz-free spaces and purely 1-unrectifiable metric spaces

Abstract

The Lipschitz-free space $\mathcal{F}(M)$ is a canonical linearization of a complete metric space $M$ whose topological dual is the space of Lipschitz functions on $M$. We review the properties of $\mathcal{F}(M)$ when the underlying space $M$ is purely 1-unrectifiable, that is, it contains no bi-Lipschitz copy of a subset of $\mathbb{R}$ with positive measure. For compact $M$, this is equivalent to several Banach space properties of $\mathcal{F}(M)$, including the Radon-Nikod\'ym and Schur properties or admitting a predual. We shall see how the study of locally flat Lipschitz functions on $M$ reveals these equivalences, and describe a technique that allows most of them to be transferred to the non-compact setting. This manuscript is an expository text based on results by the author in collaboration with C. Gartland, C. Petitjean and A. Proch\'azka, originally published in a Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. paper, and corresponds to a lecture delivered at the Second Winter School in Geometric Measure Theory at Westlake University, Hangzhou, on February 2026.