Tunis Tackles Its Duplicate Street Signage Crisis — But Other Cities Got There First

Walk down Avenue Habib Bourguiba on any given morning and you will pass the same blue street-name placard mounted three times within a single 200-metre stretch. Nobody formally announced the duplication problem. It accumulated — over decades of piecemeal renovation, overlapping municipal contracts, and a signage procurement system that rewarded installation volume over coherence. Now, for the first time, Tunis Commune has confirmed it is running a systematic audit to identify and remove redundant public imagery and duplicate wayfinding infrastructure across the city's 13 arrondissements.

The timing matters. Tunis is mid-way through the 2025–2030 Urban Mobility Plan, a framework designed to streamline how residents and visitors move through the capital. Duplicate signage — and, increasingly, duplicate digital displays on municipal kiosks in areas like Lac I and the Medina perimeter — is now classified as a cost inefficiency and a visual-quality issue under that plan. The audit, which began in March 2026, is expected to produce a preliminary report by September.

What the Audit Is Actually Finding

The problem breaks into two categories. Physical duplication covers repeated street plaques, double-mounted metro exit signs at stations including République and Barcelone on Line 1, and redundant public information boards along the Tunis Marine waterfront. Digital duplication is newer and arguably more expensive: the municipality's network of 47 smart kiosks, rolled out between 2022 and 2024 under a contract administered through the Agence de Réhabilitation et de Rénovation Urbaine (ARRU), was found to be displaying identical static images and maps on adjacent units — sometimes within 30 metres of each other in high-footfall zones like Place de la Victoire.

ARRU has not released full figures publicly. However, internal working documents reviewed by municipal councillors in May 2026 reportedly estimated that between 18 and 22 percent of physical signage installed since 2015 constitutes redundant duplication. Replacing or decommissioning that infrastructure carries a projected cost the municipality has not yet officially published.

Compare that with Casablanca, which completed a comparable audit in 2023 under its Casa-Aménagement urban agency. Moroccan municipal officials found roughly 15 percent duplication in the Maarif and Gauthier districts and decommissioned more than 340 redundant panels by early 2024. Tunis is working from a larger base — the Medina alone covers 270 hectares of dense, layered signage accumulated across Ottoman, French colonial, and post-independence eras — which makes the logistics considerably harder.

How Tunis Compares to Amman and Beirut

The regional picture is mixed. Amman's Greater Amman Municipality launched a wayfinding rationalisation programme in 2021, focused initially on the First and Second Circles, and has since extended it to the downtown Raghadan area. The programme consolidated signage vendors from nine contractors to two, cutting reported redundancy rates by roughly a third over three years. Beirut, severely constrained by infrastructure fragmentation since 2020, has made no comparable coordinated effort; its duplication problem is widely considered worse than Tunis's by urban planning observers.

Tunis Commune is working with the Institut National de la Statistique and city planning faculty at the Université de Tunis El Manar to build a georeferenced database of all public signage — a tool Casablanca and Amman both lacked at the start of their own audits and had to build retrospectively. That database, once completed, should allow the municipality to flag new duplication at the procurement stage rather than discovering it years after installation.

For residents, the practical impact depends on where they live. The Bab Souika neighbourhood, where the audit identified the highest density of redundant plaques per street block, is expected to see visible changes by early 2027 if the September report leads to a fast-track removal contract. The Lac II business district, dominated by newer digital infrastructure, will be addressed in a second phase. Anyone who has navigated the overlapping signage around the Tunis-Carthage International Airport access roads — where four separate agencies have installed their own branded panels — will understand why coordination, not just identification, is the harder half of the job.