In the wake of Tunisia’s political independence from France in 1956, the country had set out to actively preserve its built heritage and cultural monuments. Through the establishment of the Institut National d’Archéologie et d’Art (INAA) in 1957, and later, the Association de Sauvegarde de la Médina de Tunis (ASM) in June 1967, these institutions were the first of their kind in the Middle East or North Africa to promote a coherent notion of heritage. Yet the theoretical underpinnings of both the INNA and ASM were modeled after France’s ‘Loi Malraux’ of 1962 for protecting cultural patrimony. Chartered with the task of preserving Tunisia’s great historic cities, the association focused less on restoring monuments to their initial glory and more on recovering the timeworn urban fabric to a viable, livable state. With many decrepit low-income homes at risk of destruction—in part due to President Habib Bourguiba’s formal decree of 1957 demanding the razing of gourbivilles, or mud-built slum districts—certain areas received the privilege of preservation while others were neglected. This paper—which constitutes a chapter of my dissertation—questions the construction and self-evidence of heritage in Tunisia, illustrating how the voices of certain social strata are suppressed in its making, while those bolstering its legitimacy service the coherence of nationhood. In the case of preservation, how does the vernacular forward a politics of indigeneity? This paper illuminates the complicities and ambivalence of the post-colonial nation-state, and how the translations of utopic, state-sponsored rhetoric into programmatic aestheticization and demolition, clashed with the ever-growing crises of habitation.