On projectional skeletons and the Plichko property in Lipschitz-free Banach spaces

Abstract: We study projectional skeletons and the Plichko property in Lipschitz-free spaces, relating these concepts to the geometry of the underlying metric space. Specifically, we identify a metric property that characterizes the Plichko property witnessed by Dirac measures in the associated Lipschitz-free space. We also show that the Lipschitz-free space of all $\mathbb{R}$-trees has the Plichko property witnessed by molecules, and define the concept of retractional trees to generalize this result to a bigger class of metric spaces. Finally, we show that no separable subspace of $\ell_\infty$ containing $c_0$ is an $r$-Lipschitz retract for $r < 2$, which implies in particular that $\mathcal{F}(\ell_\infty)$ is not $r$-Plichko for $r < 2$.