Purely unrectifiable metric spaces and perturbations of Lipschitz functions

Abstract: We characterise purely $n$-unrectifiable subsets $S$ of a complete metric space $X$ with finite Hausdorff $n$-measure by studying arbitrarily small perturbations of elements of the set of all bounded 1-Lipschitz functions $f\colon X \to \mathbb R^m$ with respect to the supremum norm. In one such characterisation it is shown that, if $S$ has positive lower density almost everywhere, then the set of all $f$ with $\mathcal H^n(f(S))=0$ is residual. Conversely, if $E\subset X$ is $n$-rectifiable with $\mathcal H^n(E)>0$, the set of all $f$ with $\mathcal H^n(f(E))>0$ is residual. These results provide a replacement for the Besicovitch-Federer projection theorem in arbitrary metric spaces, which is known to be false outside of Euclidean spaces.