Tunis Pushes to Clean Up Its Digital Property Archives — Here's What Happened This Week

The Municipality of Tunis confirmed this week that it has completed the first operational phase of a digital archive overhaul targeting duplicate images embedded in its official urban cadastral records — a problem that planners say has quietly distorted property assessments across districts including La Médina and Bab El Bhar for at least five years.

The cleanup matters now because the municipality is deep into the revision of its Plan d'Aménagement Urbain, the city's binding land-use framework, and officials need clean data before any zoning decisions can be finalised. Duplicate images — photographs of facades, aerial shots, plot boundaries — inflate file sizes, create version-control conflicts and, in some documented cases, have caused surveyors to reference outdated structural information when preparing reports. With the PAU revision process already delayed from its original 2025 deadline, the pressure to deliver reliable records is acute.

The practical footprint of this week's work is concentrated around the Agence Foncière de l'Habitat's district office near Avenue Habib Bourguiba and the Direction Générale de l'Urbanisme et de l'Architecture office on Rue du Royaume de l'Arabie Saoudite in the city centre. Both offices manage overlapping sets of georeferenced property images, and the duplication problem has been most acute where their datasets intersect. According to municipal documentation circulated to district technicians this week, staff began systematically merging and retiring redundant entries from a shared database that covers roughly 14,000 registered urban plots in the Greater Tunis perimeter.

What the Data Shows

The scale of the problem is not trivial. Internal assessments reviewed by The Daily Tunis indicate that, before this week's phase began, approximately 23 percent of image files attached to property records in the Médina district contained at least one functional duplicate — meaning the same photograph appeared under two or more separate file identifiers. Across all four arrondissements of the municipality, the total count of flagged duplicate images exceeded 11,000 files as of late June 2026. The municipality's IT contractor, which has been working under a services agreement renewed in January 2026, is using automated hash-matching software to identify pixel-identical and near-identical files before a human reviewer confirms deletion. The process is expected to reduce total archive storage demand by an estimated 18 percent.

The issue is not unique to Tunis — cities across the Maghreb have grappled with similar digitisation hangovers from the early 2010s, when records were scanned rapidly without consistent naming protocols. Casablanca's municipal registry faced a comparable audit in 2023. But for Tunis, the timing is particularly consequential because the municipality is also preparing for the phased rollout of its e-permis de construire system, a digital building permit platform scheduled to go live in the Belvédère and El Menzah zones in the fourth quarter of 2026. Dirty image data feeding into that platform would create verification errors from day one.

What Comes Next

The second phase, expected to begin in September 2026, will extend the deduplication effort to satellite and drone imagery held by the Office de la Topographie et de la Cartographie, whose main archive facility is located in the Cité El Khadra neighbourhood. That dataset is considerably larger and includes aerial surveys commissioned between 2018 and 2024 at varying resolutions, some of which overlap significantly.

For property owners, architects and developers working in the affected districts, the practical advice from planning offices this week is straightforward: any application submitted before October 2026 that relies on archived municipal imagery should request a freshly generated record extract rather than using a cached or previously downloaded document. The municipality has indicated that updated extracts can be requested through its physical counter on Rue de Rome in central Tunis, with a standard processing time of five working days and a fee of 15 Tunisian dinars per plot file. Officials have not announced an online request option for this particular service yet, though the e-permis rollout is expected to bring one eventually.