Generalizing Block and Weinbergers characterization of amenability we introduce the notion of uniformly finite homology for a group action on a compact space and use it to give a homological characterization of topological amenability for actions. By
considering the case of the natural action of $G$ on its Stone-vCech compactification we obtain a homological characterization of exactness of the group, answering a question of Nigel Higson.
We show that topological amenability of an action of a countable discrete group on a compact space is equivalent to the existence of an invariant mean for the action. We prove also that this is equivalent to vanishing of bounded cohomology for a clas
s of Banach G-modules associated to the action, as well as to vanishing of a specific cohomology class. In the case when the compact space is a point our result reduces to a classic theorem of B.E. Johnson characterising amenability of groups. In the case when the compact space is the Stone-v{C}ech compactification of the group we obtain a cohomological characterisation of exactness for the group, answering a question of Higson.
We study a coarse homology theory with prescribed growth conditions. For a finitely generated group G with the word length metric this homology theory turns out to be related to amenability of G. We characterize vanishing of a certain fundamental cla
ss in our homology in terms of an isoperimetric inequality on G and show that on any group at most linear control is needed for this class to vanish. The latter is a homological version of the classical Burnside problem for infinite groups, with a positive solution. As applications we characterize existence of primitives of the volume form with prescribed growth and show that coarse homology classes obstruct weighted Poincare inequalities.
