Tunis Officials and Urban Planners Call for Overhaul of City's Duplicate Signage and Image Databases

Tunis's municipal digital infrastructure is carrying a problem that specialists have been raising for at least three years: thousands of duplicate images stored across disconnected databases are distorting urban planning decisions, slowing heritage documentation projects, and wasting public money. Now, with the city's next five-year development plan set to be submitted to the Assemblée des Représentants du Peuple by September 2026, the pressure to fix it has become harder to ignore.

The issue is not glamorous, but it is consequential. When engineers at the Agence de Réhabilitation et de Rénovation Urbaine — known as ARRU — pull visual records to assess a building or a streetscape, they can encounter the same façade photographed dozens of times under different file names and reference codes, with no automated system to flag the duplication. The result, according to city planning documents reviewed by The Daily Tunis, is that assessments can draw on outdated or mislabelled imagery without anyone catching the error until late in the review cycle.

What the Experts Are Saying

Specialists in urban data management have been pointing to the Médina of Tunis — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — as the sharpest example of the problem. The Médina's narrow streets around Rue Sidi Ben Arous and the souks near the Zitouna Mosque have been photographed repeatedly by at least four separate agencies over the past decade: ARRU, the Institut National du Patrimoine, the municipality's own Direction de l'Urbanisme, and independent contractors hired for European Union-funded restoration programs. None of these libraries speak to one another. Experts in geographic information systems who work on Tunisian heritage projects have described the situation, in technical briefings and conference presentations, as a textbook case of what happens when digitisation budgets are awarded without accompanying data governance frameworks.

The concern is not merely bureaucratic. Urban planners working on the Les Berges du Lac II district — where new commercial and residential construction has accelerated since 2022 — have noted that when environmental impact reviews rely on visual records, a duplicate-heavy archive makes it difficult to establish a reliable baseline. If the same construction site appears under six different image identifiers, a reviewer checking for change over time can easily miscalculate the pace of development.

Technicians at the Centre de Recherches et des Technologies de l'Eau, which intersects with drainage and green-space planning in greater Tunis, have also flagged the issue in internal working papers, describing duplicated drone footage of wadis and coastal areas near La Marsa as an obstacle to accurate flood-risk modelling.

A Fix That Requires Political Will, Not Just Software

The technical solution — a deduplication protocol that assigns a master identifier to each unique image and cross-references it across all participating agencies — is well understood. Software capable of doing this at municipal scale exists and has been deployed in cities including Barcelona and Casablanca. The harder question is governance: who owns the master database, who pays for the migration of existing records, and which ministry takes responsibility when errors surface.

Estimates circulating among municipal IT contractors put the cost of a full deduplication and standardisation project for Tunis city's core visual archives at somewhere between 800,000 and 1.2 million Tunisian dinars, depending on the scope. That figure has not been formally confirmed or budgeted by any public body as of the date of publication.

The September 2026 deadline for the development plan submission is being treated by advocates of the reform as a natural forcing function. If the plan incorporates major infrastructure or heritage commitments — particularly around the Médina's ongoing restoration or the expansion of public transport corridors through Bab El Khadra — those commitments will need to be anchored to reliable visual evidence. Duplicate-riddled databases undermine that foundation from the start.

Practically, urban specialists are recommending that any agency commissioning new photographic or drone surveys of Tunis neighbourhoods should, as an immediate interim measure, require contractors to submit images with standardised GPS metadata and acquisition dates — a minimum condition that would at least allow future deduplication to proceed more efficiently, even before a formal unified system is in place.