A unified approach to the plus-construction, Bousfield localization, Moore spaces and zero-in-the-spectrum examples

We introduce a construction adding low-dimensional cells to a space that satisfies certain low-dimensional conditions; it preserves high-dimensional homology with appropriate coefficients. This includes as special cases Quillen’s plus construction, Bousfield’s integral homology localization, the existence of Moore spaces M(G,1) and Bousfield and Kan’s partial k-completion of spaces. We also use it to generalize counterexamples to the zero-in-the-spectrum conjecture found by Farber and Weinberger, and by Higson, Roe and Schick.