We introduce a geometric invariant, called finite decomposition complexity
(FDC), to study topological rigidity of manifolds. We prove for instance that
if the fundamental group of a compact aspherical manifold M has FDC, and if N
is homotopy equivalent to M, then M x R^n is homeomorphic to N x R^n, for n
large enough. This statement is known as the stable Borel conjecture. On the
other hand, we show that the class of FDC groups includes all countable
subgroups of GL(n,K), for any field K, all elementary amenable groups, and is
closed under taking subgroups, extensions, free amalgamated products, HNN
extensions, and direct unions.Comment: 58 pages, 5 figure
