Convexities of metric spaces

We introduce two kinds of the notion of convexity of a metric space, called k-convexity and L-convexity, as generalizations of the CAT(0)-property and of the nonpositively curved property in the sense of Busemann, respectively. 2-uniformly convex Banach spaces as well as CAT(1)-spaces with small diameters satisfy both these convexities. Among several geometric and analytic results, we prove the solvability of the Dirichlet problem for maps into a wide class of metric spaces.