How does standardization make land a perceivable and governable object? What are the political consequences of making land governable in this manner? The literature on land in the Middle East and North Africa region can be grouped in two broad categories. The first provides historical accounts of the constitution of property rights in regimes with overlapping tenure systems (Owen, 2001) and documents the violence which accompanies property making as nation making (Mitchell 2002, 62-63). The second focuses on informal property rights in the expanding peripheries of the region’s cities, and puts particular emphasis on the law and its interpretations in addressing the political repercussions of tenure in/security in these spaces (Razzaz 1993, 1994 on Amman, Jordan, Fawaz 2008, 2014, Clerc 2006 on Beirut, Clerc 2013 on Syria, Sims 2016 on Egypt). Rather than focus on property making and tenure in/security, I propose to examine the technologies that make land thinkable before it is turned into property characterized by a particular type of tenure. To do this, I focus on five decades of urban upgrading programs in Tunisia and argue that these programs made land thinkable as urban by creating expectations for service delivery. While expectations of service delivery extend indefinitely into the future, the actual provision of services (paved roads, water, electricity and sanitation) is the product of particular political bargains. Such a history of urbanization from below enables a narration of the current post-revolutionary juncture that is centered on land rather than labor.