A number of multilateral and bilateral development agencies celebrate Tunisia’s urban upgrading program as a “best practice” that succeeded in universalizing access to services in the country. Deemed exceptional in comparison to its Arab neighbors who enforced slum clearance rather than in-situ upgrading, these programs have been continuously funded by development agencies for the past 50 years. Though in the early 1960’s the post-independent state implemented slum clearance, these policies were later abandoned. This paper traces the global knowledge flows at the origin of Tunisia’s urban upgrading programs. It draws on the policy mobility literature in geography to follow the work of a group of young architects concerned with the slummification of the Medina. In 1967, they established the Association for the Protection of the Medina (Association de Sauvegarde de la Médina de Tunis) to protect its heritage buildings. One of these architects, Wassim Ben Mahmoud received his training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in the United States whose architecture department had a strong interest in questions of international development. Ben Mahmoud finished his master thesis in 1972. In the same year, his thesis advisor John F.C. Turner published the book Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process (1972) reflecting on self-help housing from the slums of Peru. Turner came to be credited for the “aided self-help” housing policies that the World Bank starting implementing all over the world. This paper will trace these global connections in an effort to nuance the claim of Tunisian exceptionalism.