Variational problems concerning length distances in metric spaces

Abstract

Given a locally compact, complete metric space (X,D) and an open set Ω⊆X, we study the class of length distances d on Ω that are bounded from above and below by fixed multiples of the ambient distance D. More precisely, we prove that the uniform convergence on compact sets of distances in this class is equivalent to the Γ-convergence of several associated variational problems. Along the way, we fix some oversights appearing in the previous literature.