One of the most persistent images of rogue ungovernable spaces that haunts Tunisia’s post-revolution future is that of popular neighborhoods. The 2011 revolution added danger and fear of their potential rebellion to the images of lawlessness, decay, and backwardness already associated with these neighborhoods. In this presentation, I trace these fears to the French colonial preoccupation with ‘nomadism,’ the need to fix people to territory and make property alienable. I show how nomadism tested the capacity of the colonial administration to govern the city’s edge. In tracking the evolution of nomadism from a mobility to a property issue, I trace the emergence of popular neighborhoods as a problem space and the conditions under which their presence became an unsolvable problem – the solution here is to make them disappear. The intractability of this problem carried over from the colonial to the post-independence period, where adequate housing and the upgrading of underserviced popular neighborhoods remained on the agenda. Its management under French colonialism gave birth to new institutions, such as urban upgrading, which took various forms in the post-colonial period until the 2011 revolution and its aftermath. The analysis points to three conclusions: city-making has always been an essential terrain for political participation. Poor people's non-access to property is at the heart of this terrain. Second, seemingly urban problems exceeded urban and spatial dimensions; they demonstrated ways of governing vast territories to bring them under ever-fleeting centralized rule. Accomplishing this required complex bureaucratic schemes that necessitated alignment within institutions on issues disputed within the bureaucracy and led to institutional innovations that resulted equally from compromise and ingenuity. Third, and relatedly, this history of the genesis of popular neighborhoods is also a history of state-building and its colonial precedents from the perspective of one intractable planning problem: governing the city’s margins.