Can you make the category whose objects are pairs of spaces $(X,A)$, and morphisms the obvious diagrams, into a model category? Of course I want this to be done in a meaningful way, that is, agreeing with the adjoint functors $X\mapsto (X,\emptyset)$ and $(X,A)\mapsto X$?


There might be some intuitive reason that it is wrong to expect this, but I don't see it yet. 


Thanks!



Can one make the category of pairs of topological spaces a model category?
The answer has to be no. There's just no good homotopy theoretic way to talk about subspaces, because up to homotopy every map is an inclusion (via the mapping space construction). So even before you run into the completeness issue Karol raises you have a more fundamental issue of what the homotopy category would be. It seems to me that there's no good category theoretic/homotopy theoretic way to pick out a space and a subspace of it; the closest you can do is Tyler's comment and Karol's answer. Since neither of them mentioned this, I'll mention that it's also known as the Arrow Category $Arr(C)$ (in this case $Arr(Top)$). It's a well-studied object, but on the surface seems very different from what you were asking for. However, the lens of homotopy can't see the difference between an object in $Arr(Top)$ and an inclusion, so I guess that's the best you can do. The other obvious idea (taking the product model structure on $Top \times Top$ and then placing some restriction so the only pairs $(X,A)$ you get have $A\subset X$) fails for the same reason.


