Tunis Struggles to Purge Duplicate Street Art and Signage — While Casablanca and Amman Have Already Moved On

Walk along Avenue Habib Bourguiba on any weekday morning and the problem announces itself before you reach the Municipal Theatre. The same promotional billboard design appears three times within 400 metres — same typeface, same colour block, same faded corner — while two near-identical heritage murals compete for attention on the underpass wall near Place de la République. The duplication is not accidental. It is the product of a permit system that critics say has no mechanism to flag repeat imagery before it goes up.

The issue matters now because Tunis is midway through a five-year urban renewal programme backed partly by the Agence de Réhabilitation et de Rénovation Urbaine, known as ARRU, which has set 2027 as a target date for completing visual-identity upgrades in six central districts including the Médina and Lafayette. Duplicate images waste a portion of that budget, dilute the visual impact the programme is designed to create, and — according to planning documents circulated by the municipality earlier this year — have become one of the top three complaints received from neighbourhood councils in Bab Souika and El Menzah.

What Tunis Does, and What It Doesn't

The municipality currently routes public-art and commercial-signage applications through the Direction des Services Techniques at the Hôtel de Ville on Avenue de la Liberté. Staff there check for structural safety and zoning compliance. What they do not routinely run is a visual-database check — a cross-reference against existing approved imagery — before issuing a permit. That single missing step is what Casablanca's Agence Urbaine de Casablanca introduced in 2022 as part of its Charte Graphique de l'Espace Public, and what Amman's Greater Amman Municipality embedded into its e-permit portal in late 2023. Both cities report measurable reductions in redundant public imagery within 18 months of implementation, according to their respective published municipal reports.

Tunis has roughly 2,400 registered outdoor advertising panels across the greater city, according to figures published by the Office National de la Publicité in its most recent annual review. Of those, municipal inspectors flagged approximately 310 as carrying imagery substantially identical to at least one other panel within a 500-metre radius. That is close to 13 percent of the total inventory — a share that urban-design practitioners in comparable North African capitals consider high for a city investing in heritage tourism.

The Médina, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is where the tension is sharpest. Restoration work on the Souk El Attarine corridor finished in late 2024, but follow-up audits by ARRU found that replacement wayfinding plaques installed during the project duplicated a design already in use on three separate streets in the Halfaouine neighbourhood, undermining the intention to give each district a legible visual identity. The cost of replacing those plaques a second time was not disclosed in public budget documents.

What Other Cities Got Right

Marrakech took a different route. The city's Conseil Communal approved a negative-list protocol in 2021 — a rolling register of imagery formally retired from public use — and tied renewal of commercial leases on medina-adjacent properties to compliance with that list. Tunis has no equivalent instrument. Beirut, despite its well-documented infrastructure constraints, piloted a voluntary deduplication scheme in the Gemmayzeh district in 2024 with backing from the Order of Engineers and Architects of Beirut; early results published by that body suggest a 27 percent drop in repeat imagery in the pilot zone within nine months.

The practical path forward for Tunis is relatively straightforward on paper. ARRU's programme director has indicated in written responses to neighbourhood council queries — responses seen by The Daily Tunis — that a digital asset registry is under consideration for inclusion in the 2027 programme review. That review is scheduled for the first quarter of next year. Residents and business owners with signage applications pending before the Direction des Services Techniques are advised to request a written confirmation of uniqueness as part of their dossier; while not yet a formal requirement, inspectors have discretion to issue such confirmation, and it provides a paper trail if disputes arise later. The window to shape the 2027 review is open. It will not stay open indefinitely.