Greening Tunis’ Ancient Medina & Mapping its Plants

On the evening of July 15th, Jninet El Hafsia, a community garden tucked away in the Hafsia neighborhood of the Tunis medina, burst with the revelry of a large fair. Children from the surrounding neighborhood—who helped to manage, till, and plant the garden—sat for a film screening of Wildlife Wonders, a 2025 documentary-short on Tunisian conservation efforts. Others joined in food and drink provided by neighboring Dar Ben Gacem hotel as they listened to Leah Whitmoyer and Firas Khelifi give presentations about plant life in the Tunis medina and the history of the space.

Jninet El Hafsia is the most visible of recent efforts to map, reclaim, and restore the medina’s neglected urban environment—efforts driven forward by a small team of urban development enthusiasts who are trying to reshape and green its public spaces. 

A Garden Where There Was None

Just three years ago, Jninet El Hafsia was a derelict lot and de facto garbage dump, according to Firas Khelifi. 

In 2021, Firas Khelifi, a then recently graduated agronomic engineer from the National Agronomic Institute of Tunisia (INAT) approached local entrepreneur Leila Ben Gacem with an idea to create not just a public space, but a green one. 

“The medina was my playground growing up,” said Khelifi. “When I started studying at INAT, I was asking myself how I could apply my studies to the medina. The best thing I thought to do was something public, for the community.”

In 2020, Ben Gacem’s consultancy Blue Fish and the Corporate Social Responsibility wing of her medina-based boutique hotel Dar Ben Gacem partnered with Cities Alliance, USAID, and the Tunis municipality. The “Femmedina” project aimed to better understand the challenges women of the medina faced, and how to better integrate these women into the social, political, and economic happenings of the area. 

This first phase of the project included 100 interviews with women, 20 with men, and 15 other meetings between stakeholders—including the mayor of Tunis, academics, municipal heads of neighborhoods—to understand more about the issue. Four group workshops with women were also conducted.

These interviews informed Ben Gacem’s interest in creating more public space for women to be able to gather more freely in the medina. “I thought, where can a mother leave her kids and feel safe?” Ben Gacem told Meshkal. “I wanted to create a space where children can play, where women can meet and have an exchange. The men have plenty of public spaces to meet, but the women of the medina don’t.”

“The neighborhoods are suffocating. I don’t feel I want to go out because there is nothing appealing, neither the green spaces nor the spaces for fun and leisure,” Amna, one 15-year-old workshop participant told Femmedina organizers. “I would love to have a small initiative for women, a club, for example where women can gather in a nice open space to learn and share and enjoy their time.”

The Cities Alliance, launched in 1999 with the help of the World Bank and the United Nations Center for Human Settlements, bills itself as a global association aiming to ”enhance the well-being of urban populations by delivering innovative, multi-sectoral solutions to urban poverty.”

However, the alliance has also been critiqued as focusing on “slum clearances and alternative uses of slum areas” through market mechanisms in a way that amounts to “‘dispossession’ through which slum dwellers are disenfranchised from urban lands for major capital-centric redevelopments.”

Ben Gacem said that, through the partnership, the group identified 126 collapsed buildings or abandoned, unused lots throughout the medina—many of which were unsafe to the public.

The Hafsia lot was one of these sites, and at the time served as both a de facto dump and parking lot, according to Ben Gacem. It became the site of one of several recommendations Ben Gacem and Cities Alliance published in the Femmedina report to revitalize vacant sites, largely because “it was one of the only ones undoubtedly owned by the municipality,” she said. “Identifying ownership of unused areas can be extremely tricky. Sometimes there’s a lack of paperwork or proof as to who owns what.” 

Through USAID funding, Cities Alliance submitted a proposal to the Tunis municipality to clear the site in 2021, and within three months, the site was cleared. It was then that Firas Khelifi and Ben Gacem were introduced through a mutual connection. 

“I thought—why not turn [Hafsia] into not just something useful as Leila [Ben Gacem] had planned, but something green?” Khelifi said. Ben Gacem then hired Firas, and the Jnina project was underway.

Building Community Buy-in

Throughout 2021 and 2022, Khelifi alongside volunteers and organizational partners including the Observatory of Food Sovereignty and the Environment, Scouts El Médina, and others met weekly to plant crops and trees in the newly cleared Hafsia space. But there was a problem. Plants were often stolen—sometimes the same day they were put in the ground. Khelifi and Ben Gacem responded by sourcing more plants, and doing more planting.

“The community didn’t know how to interact with the Jnina, because a public space like this is just not a normal concept” Khelifi said. “We had to start explaining: ‘We’re not the municipality. We’re the community.’”

Khelifi explained that often when planting, community members would stop to watch and ask about the Jnina. “We started asking people: what do you want to plant? What do you want to do here?” he said. “It’s not top-down. It’s everyone’s space.”

Over time, and as Khelifi began engaging more with the local community, the project shifted. Residents began offering water, joining work days, and bringing their children to help. They began mobilizing neighbors, hosting clean-ups and community-involved planting days. Ultimately, nearly 50 planting sessions happened by the end of 2022 thanks to the efforts of over 100 volunteers. 

“Even after the first summer, when we were still having problems with plant theft, women were out there at night hanging out. Their kids would come out and play,” Firas said. 

According to Blue Fish’s newly-published Jninet El Hafsia website, the space has hosted over 40 events since 2021. In 2023, Jninet El Hafsia became a venue for the biennial Dream City Festival featuring open-air film screenings, artist exhibitions, and community workshops.

Now, the garden features tomatoes, corn, melons, peppers, olive trees, and a range of flowers all found throughout the north of Tunisia. 

“The place was never planned to be a green space, so now we’re dealing with challenges like water and other technical problems,” Firas said. “But, these are the better problems to have.”

Mapping “Medina El Khadra”

Leah Whitmoyer, a biology graduate from Atlanta, Georgia, was on a Fulbright Grant to Tunisia working on crop and water research at INAT when she was introduced to Leila Ben Gacem via a U.S. embassy contact. Immediately, Ben Gacem had an idea.

“Leila approached me about documenting the medina’s plants, and to see what already existed,” Whitmoyer said. “There was no existing data.”

In April 2025, Whitmoyer walked the Tunis medina street by street, photographing and identifying every plant she could find. She created an interactive map and public database with over 5,000 ornamental, edible, and untended plants throughout the medina. While the plants documented by Whitmoyer are bound to change over time, Whitmoyer hopes her data can provide a baseline for understanding the medina’s biodiversity. 

“Knowing what grows here helps us to understand how we can better plan green spaces in the future,” Whitmoyer said. “For example, what surprised me a lot was seeing fig trees growing sporadically out of rooftops or out of walls. These trees have huge leaves, and can provide temperature-changing levels of shade.”

For Leila Ben Gacem, this kind of granular data is a gold mine. 

“You see a bougainvillea on a street, people want to be there. It’s more Instagrammable, it gives a little shade, it brings better business,” said Ben Gacem. “It’s just a little plant, but it has this transformative power across the board. And now we have this basis for understanding not just this one plant, but all of our medina’s plants.”

Meshkal reached out to Lana Salman, an urban scholar who has studied cities in Tunisia to ask about the development of the medina through clearing derelict lots and greening spaces.

“Tourism and jobs are important but not enough,” she said. “The medina needs concerted urban development policy that valorizes people and heritage. Parts of the medina are some of the poorest districts of municipal Tunis, and no amount of clearing garbage will replace an absent municipal government that has a real revalorization strategy of people and their livelihoods and spaces.”

A Blueprint for a Greener Medina

Ben Gacem says she also sees an issue with the municipal government. 

“Urban management here is fragmented,” she said. “The municipality is weakened. Everyone is in charge, and no one is in charge. The process to get the Jnina to where we could plant was a very difficult process.”

She credits Khelifi and Whitmoyer for pushing the greening work forward. 

“Firas [Khelifi] is amazing with young people, and [he] created the Jnina to be what it is today. Leah [Whitmoyer] opened my eyes [from] being plant blind. Now I see space differently. You put an olive tree in a small courtyard, and suddenly, people want to stay.”

Green public spaces are now a key part of her vision for the medina. 

“Public and green spaces aren’t luxuries,” she said. “They’re fundamental for urban wellbeing—especially for women and children.” 

Jninet El Hafsia may be just one lot, but it has offered a kind of template: build with the community, and embrace the often slow work of changing how space is used and perceived.

“The Jnina was once nothing,” said Whitmoyer. “Now it’s growing food. It’s a working model of what the medina could be.”

Khelifi has ambitions to expand the model: more green spaces, more youth engagement, more experiments with local biodiversity. Khelifi has worked with the Tunisian Scouts and local schools to build volunteer networks. He hopes to work with the municipality to drill a well to ensure water access in the Jnina.

Khelifi hopes that BlueFish can not only create more gardens and public space, but reshape the medina.

“This can be the beginning of a brand of public spaces that normalizes and duplicates green public spaces. But we can push and we can do more,” Khelifi said. “I want to do temperature checks in shaded areas, and start looking at how we can use the idea of greening and planting to start mitigating climate impacts.”

Fadil Aliriza contributed to this reporting.

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