Brush spaces and the fixed point property

We introduce the notions of a brush space and a weak brush space. Each of these spaces has a compact connected core with attached connected fibers and may be either compact or non-compact. Many spaces, both in the Hausdorff non-metrizable setting and in the metric setting, have realizations as (weak) brush spaces. We show that these spaces have the fixed point property if and only if subspaces with core and finitely many fibers have the fixed point property. This result generalizes the fixed point result for generalized Alexandroff/Urysohn Squares in Hagopian and Marsh (2010) [4]. We also look at some familiar examples, with and without the fixed point property, from Bing (1969) [1], Connell (1959) [3], Knill (1967) [7] and note the brush space structures related to these examples. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.