Abstract
We investigate a way to turn an arbitrary (usually, unbounded) metric space M into a bounded metric space B in such a way that the corresponding Lipschitz-free spaces F(M) and F(B) are isomorphic. The construction we provide is functorial in a weak sense and has the advantage of being explicit.
Apart from its intrinsic theoretical interest, it has many applications in that it allows to transfer many arguments valid for Lipschitz-free spaces over bounded spaces to Lipschitz-free spaces over unbounded spaces. Furthermore, we show that with a slightly modified pointwise multiplication, the space Lip(0)(M) of scalar-valued Lipschitz functions vanishing at zero over any (unbounded) pointed metric space is a Banach algebra with its canonical Lipschitz norm.