Duplicate Images Are Cluttering Tunis's Official Platforms — and Residents Are Paying the Price

Tunis city residents attempting to access planning permits, neighbourhood maps, or public event listings through the Commune de Tunis's online portals have encountered a persistent problem: duplicate, mislabelled, and outdated images are appearing across multiple official pages, making it difficult to distinguish current from obsolete information. The issue, which digital administrators at the Agence de Promotion de l'Industrie et de l'Innovation (APII) have flagged internally in recent months, reflects a broader breakdown in how the city manages its visual digital assets.

The timing matters. Tunis is midway through a phased smart-city initiative tied to the 2025–2030 Municipal Digital Transition Plan, which earmarked public-facing platforms — including the Commune's e-services portal and the Tunis Afrique Presse municipal information feed — as priority areas for upgrade. Duplicate image content undermines that effort directly, creating broken user journeys at exactly the moment the city is trying to push residents toward online rather than in-person administration.

Where the Problem Shows Up

The duplication is most visible in two places. First, the online property and zoning map hosted by the Direction Générale de l'Urbanisme, which serves residents in dense inner-city districts including Bab El Khadra and La Hafsia, is displaying repeated aerial photographs from different years without date stamps, making it impossible to tell which image reflects the current building footprint of a given plot. Second, digital display boards along Avenue Habib Bourguiba — updated as part of a 2023 smart-signage contract — have repeatedly cycled the same promotional images for events that concluded months ago, including a cultural programme that ran at the Théâtre Municipal in March.

For small business owners on Rue de Marseille and residents filing renovation declarations in the Belvédère neighbourhood, the practical consequence is straightforward: they arrive at municipal offices having misread digital instructions illustrated by the wrong image, requiring clerks to restart the intake process. Staff at the Arrondissement de la Médina have informally noted that duplicate visual content across the e-permits section generates repeated clarification visits, adding pressure to counters that already handle several hundred dossiers per week.

The root cause is largely technical. Municipal platforms often rely on shared content management systems where images uploaded multiple times — sometimes by different departments, sometimes after system migrations — are not automatically deduplicated. A 2024 audit of public-sector digital infrastructure conducted by the Unité de l'Administration Électronique under the Ministry of Communication Technologies found that roughly 38 percent of government content management installations in Tunisia lacked automated duplicate-detection protocols. The Commune de Tunis was among the institutions reviewed, though the audit did not publish institution-specific scores.

What Residents Can Do Now — and What Should Change

Until the platforms are cleaned up, residents dealing with zoning or permit queries are better served by cross-referencing the Commune's PDF bulletins, which are archived by quarter and carry publication dates, rather than relying on image-heavy web pages. The Maison de la Cité in El Menzah VI offers a free digital assistance desk on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, where staff can help residents identify the correct and current documentation for their arrondissement.

Longer term, the fix is straightforward if unglamorous: implementing a hash-based deduplication layer within the city's content management system, combined with mandatory metadata tagging — including a creation date and responsible department — for every image file uploaded to public platforms. The European Union's DigitAfrica programme, which has a Tunisia component active through December 2026, includes a technical assistance stream that covers exactly this kind of back-end governance work. The Commune has until September 2026 to submit project proposals under that stream's current call for applications.

Residents who spot duplicate or outdated images on official Tunis platforms can report them through the Commune's citizen feedback form at the e-services portal, selecting the category "Contenu Numérique" under the general complaints section. Every report filed creates a logged ticket — and a paper trail that administrators can use to prioritise which sections of the platform need attention first.