Tunis Municipality Moves to Fix Duplicate Image Crisis Plaguing City's Digital Property Records This Week

The Commune de Tunis announced Thursday that it has launched a formal audit of its digital property records system after staff and residents flagged hundreds of cases where photographs attached to land and building files had been duplicated, swapped, or incorrectly assigned — errors that in some cases have delayed property transactions for weeks. The announcement came after a backlog of complaints reached the municipality's Direction des Affaires Foncières office on Avenue Habib Bourguiba, where queues have reportedly stretched into the street on multiple mornings this week.

The timing matters. Tunisia is midway through a broader push to digitise its land registry under the national e-Gov programme administered through the Agence Nationale de Certification Électronique. The cadastral photo database, which links georeferenced images to individual parcel records, was migrated to a new server infrastructure in late May 2026. Technical staff say the duplication problem appears to have originated during that migration, when batch-processing scripts assigned image files using sequential numbering that did not match the original parcel identifiers. The result: a single photograph of a rooftop in La Marsa appears attached to dozens of unrelated parcels, while some Medina properties show no image at all.

Where the Problem Is Worst

Two districts appear most affected. The Médina of Tunis — whose dense, irregular plot boundaries make accurate photographic attribution especially difficult — accounts for a disproportionate share of the flagged files. Residents dealing with inheritance transfers at the Tribunal Immobilier on Rue de Rome have been told to bring physical deed documents to supplement their digital records while corrections are processed. The second concentration of errors is in the newer residential zones of Ariana Ville, where rapid construction since 2019 generated large numbers of new parcel entries that were later incorporated into the migrated database.

The municipal Direction des Systèmes d'Information confirmed this week that its team has so far identified and tagged approximately 840 affected records out of an estimated 112,000 parcels in the greater Tunis urban zone — roughly 0.75 percent of the total. The figure sounds small, but each flagged record can block notarial deeds, bank mortgage approvals, and inheritance proceedings until corrected. Property lawyers working near the Tribunal de Première Instance de Tunis on Avenue de Madrid say turnaround times for routine property searches have slipped from two or three days to more than a week in affected cases.

What the Municipality Is Doing — and What Comes Next

City technicians are running a deduplication script developed with the support of the Institut National de la Cartographie et de la Télédétection, which holds the original georeferenced image archive. Officials say the priority list targets parcels with active notarial transactions first, followed by those linked to pending bank collateral assessments. The municipality has set an internal target of clearing 90 percent of flagged files by 25 July 2026, though that schedule depends on cross-referencing with INCD records that are not fully digitised themselves.

For residents, the practical advice is straightforward. Anyone expecting to complete a property sale, mortgage drawdown, or inheritance registration in the next three weeks should visit the Direction des Affaires Foncières in person, bringing the original titre foncier number and any physical photographs or architectural plans they hold. The municipality has also opened a dedicated email address — referenced on the Commune de Tunis official website — where notaries and property lawyers can submit priority correction requests with supporting documentation.

The episode has added fresh urgency to a debate among Tunis urban planners about whether the city moved too fast in consolidating its spatial databases without adequate validation testing. It also lands at an awkward moment: the municipality is due to present its digital infrastructure progress report to the Greater Tunis Urban Agency — the Grand Tunis Agglomération — in September, ahead of a budget review covering the 2027 municipal investment plan. How cleanly the image database is restored by then will carry weight in those conversations.