Sobolev spaces and harmonic maps between singular spaces

Recently Korevaar and Schoen developed a Sobolev theory for maps from smooth (at least ) manifolds into general metric spaces by proving that the weak limit of appropriate average difference quotients is well behaved. Here we extend this theory to functions defined over Lipschitz manifold. As an application we then prove an existence theorem for harmonic maps from Lipschitz manifolds to NPC metric spaces. Received December 6, 1996 / Accepted March 4, 1997