Bounded cohomology and homotopy colimits

The comparison map from bounded cohomology to singular cohomology plays an important role in the study of bounded cohomology theory and its applications. The vanishing and covering theorems of Gromov and Ivanov show interesting and useful properties of the comparison map under appropriate assumptions. We discuss an approach to these theorems, based on the general homotopy-theoretic properties of the comparison map, and obtain new proofs and refined versions of these results.