ABSTRACT
Changes and innovations of the post-metropolitan landscape are not tied to the traditional factors of concentrated urban agglomeration, but they are distributed in the regional space, making the territory tormented and rough, and the density gradient broken and unpredictable. The depiction of the historical-geographical patterns tells the subtle game between the pervasiveness of the urbanization processes and the physical roughness of the territory. The concept of physicality has been the interpretative device used by the research in two different fields: urbanization dynamics and governance processes. Urban and territorial settlements could be considered a sort of mineralization of humanity: 'human-made structures are much like mountains and rocks: the accumulation of materials hardened and shaped by historical processes'. The economic landscape of Tuscany is characterized by the concentration of industry in the urbanized central ellipse, more specifically in the two metropolitan areas of Florence and Pisa-Livorno.
