Isometry groups with radical, and aspherical Riemannian manifolds with large symmetry I

Abstract: Every compact aspherical Riemannian manifold admits a canonical series of orbibundle structures with infrasolv fibers which is called its infrasolv tower. The tower arises from the solvable radicals of isometry group actions on the universal covers. Its length and the geometry of its base measure the degree of continuous symmetry of an aspherical Riemannian manifold. We say that the manifold has large symmetry if it admits an infrasolv tower whose base is a locally homogeneous space. We construct examples of aspherical manifolds with large symmetry, which do not support any locally homogeneous Riemannian metrics.