An alternative definition of coarse structures

Roe [J. Roe, Lectures on Coarse Geometry, University Lecture Series, vol. 31, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2003] introduced coarse structures for arbitrary sets X by considering subsets of X×X. In this paper we introduce large scale structures on X via the notion of uniformly bounded families and we show their equivalence to coarse structures on X. That way all basic concepts of large scale geometry (asymptotic dimension, slowly oscillating functions, Higson compactification) have natural definitions and basic results from metric geometry carry over to coarse geometry.