A new characterization of Sobolev spaces on Lipschitz differentiability spaces

Abstract: We prove a new characterization of metric Sobolev spaces, in the spirit of Brezis--Van Schaftingen--Yung's asymptotic formula. A new feature of our work is that we do not need Poincar\'e inequality which is a common tool in the literature. Another new feature is that we find a direct link between Brezis--Van Schaftingen--Yung's asymptotic formula and Cheeger's Lipschitz differentiability.