Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
In the framework of homological characterizations of relative hyperbolicity, Groves and Manning posed the question of whether a simply connected 2-complex $X$ with a linear homological isoperimetric inequality, a bound on the length of attachingmaps of 2-cells, and finitely many 2-cells adjacent to any edge must have a fine 1-skeleton. We provide a positive answer to this question. We revisit a homological characterization of relative hyperbolicity and show that a group $G$ is hyperbolic relative to a collection of subgroups $P$ if and only if $G$ acts cocompactly with finite edge stabilizers on a connected 2-dimensional cell complex with a linear homological isoperimetric inequality and $P$ is a collection of representatives of conjugacy classes of vertex stabilizers.