Reedy Categories and Their Generalizations

We observe that the Reedy model structure on a diagram category can be constructed by iterating an operation of “bigluing” model structures along a pair of functors and a natural transformation. This yields a new explanation of the definition of Reedy categories: they are almost exactly those small categories for which the category of diagrams and its model structure can be constructed by iterated bigluing. It also gives a consistent way to produce generalizations of Reedy categories, including the generalized Reedy categories of Cisinski and Berger–Moerdijk and the enriched Reedy categories of Angeltveit, but also new versions such as a combined notion of “enriched generalized Reedy category”.