How Tunis's Public Records Archives Fell Into a Duplicate Image Crisis — And What It Cost the City

The problem did not arrive overnight. Tunis's municipal digitisation programme, launched under the Direction des Affaires Foncières in the early 2010s, was meant to modernise the city's sprawling paper archives into a single searchable database. What it produced instead, according to planning staff who have dealt with the fallout, was a tangled duplicate record system that, by 2024, had created tens of thousands of replicated image files across land registry and urban zoning documents — slowing permit approvals, inflating storage costs, and, in at least a handful of documented cases, causing outright confusion over property boundaries in densely built neighbourhoods like La Medina and Bab Souika.

The issue matters now because Tunis is in the middle of a significant push to accelerate construction permits under the 2025–2030 Plan d'Aménagement Urbain, a city-wide framework approved by the Conseil Municipal de Tunis in late 2024. The plan targets a 30 percent reduction in permit processing time within three years. With duplicated scanned documents clogging the back-end systems that planners rely on, that target was, according to internal assessments circulated earlier this year, already under threat before a single crane had swung into position.

A Decade of Mismatched Scans

The roots of the duplication problem trace back to at least 2012, when the city contracted successive vendors to scan physical files stored in the Archives de la Commune de Tunis on Rue de la Commission. Each vendor used different resolution standards and file-naming conventions. When files were merged into a central server — a process that happened in stages between 2016 and 2019 — the system failed to recognise that thousands of documents were near-identical copies of the same original. A cadastral map of Avenue Habib Bourguiba, for example, might exist under four distinct filenames, each scanned at slightly different contrast settings, none flagged as redundant.

By the time the Direction Générale des Systèmes d'Information began a formal audit in March 2025, the municipal server held an estimated 2.3 terabytes of duplicate image data across urban planning departments alone — a figure that emerged from a preliminary audit summary shared with city council members in April 2025. Storage alone was costing the municipality roughly 18,000 Tunisian dinars per quarter in cloud overflow fees, according to the same document summary, as local servers had long since hit capacity.

Neighbourhoods with older, more contested land records bore the brunt. In Le Bardo and parts of Ettahrir, where informal construction from the 1980s and 1990s was retroactively registered during earlier amnesty programmes, the duplicated files often contained slightly different boundary markings — a consequence of re-scanning documents that had themselves been corrected by hand. Planning officers checking permit applications in those zones had to cross-reference multiple versions of the same map manually, adding days to what should be a standardised digital check.

The Push Toward a Clean System

A remediation contract was awarded to a Tunis-based IT services firm in January 2026, with a mandate to run de-duplication software across all municipal image archives by the end of the third quarter of this year. The process involves hashing algorithms that identify visually similar files even when their filenames differ — a technique that has been used in government digitisation projects in Morocco and Jordan, giving Tunis's technical team regional precedents to draw on.

The Agence Foncière de l'Habitat, which maintains a parallel database of subsidised housing land titles, is running a coordinated clean-up of its own records through the same period, targeting completion before October 2026. The two systems are not yet integrated, which remains a separate challenge the Plan d'Aménagement Urbain's digital annex explicitly acknowledges.

For residents and property owners dealing with permit applications right now, the practical advice from the municipality's public-facing helpdesk at the Mairie de Tunis on Place du Gouvernement is straightforward: submit original physical documents alongside digital copies where requested, and expect processing timelines to remain longer than the official target until the de-duplication work clears the backlog. The third-quarter deadline is the date to watch.