City Art Lighting attracts tourism and commerce to the world

Light project contributing a new experience to the city’s cultural development and beautification. It served as a creative stimulus and opened up a new doorway to the substantial experience CA lighting possess in the lighting of monuments. This new concept gives visitors an increased attention span to monuments by combining lighting with sound.

An light really boost a city’s tourism? In what way and what are the public lighting strategies that can help stimulate tourism growth in a city? These are the questions that have been at the centre of dedicated surveys over the past few years. One of these surveys is the one promoted by CA lighting, an association that brings together the administrators of over one hundred cities across four continents. An international conference has recently issued a document where effective lighting schemes are regarded as factors to boost tourism, and special strategies are submitted to public administrators to protect public lighting within a touristic marketing plan agreed by all the parties involved.

Benefits these projects has provided a significant increase in the turnover and economic benefits for a high number of retail shops located in the central city area. In the facilities where the institutions are to operate, jobs will be created for a large number of people in a wide range of catering and commercial businesses that will enjoy new prosperity from a greater number of tourist customers. The majority of foreign tourists visit the central city area to record their visits to Skopje with night-time pictures. According to the latest data from the State Statistical Office, 22,153 foreign tourists entered Macedonia up to May 2014, and 9,000 of them visited Skopje.  The number of tourists increases every year. In 2013, Skopje was visited by 168,786 tourists; 149,201 were foreign and 19,596 domestic. There were a total of 286,682 overnight stays in Skopje in 2013 (259,608 for foreign and 29,074 domestic).

Low-energy LED lighting reduced Skopje’s energy bill by more than 40%, and maintenance savings of over 20% are expected compared with conventional fluorescent light sources. When Skopje achieves 100% LED lighting, energy efficiency with savings exceeding 65% could be achieved to underline the “Green image” of the entire project.

Over the past two decades, CA lighting is proud to have been involved in some truly high profile architectural lighting projects. With our combined wealth of knowledge and our reputation for innovative design ideas, we are a natural choice for the world’s leading architects and designers, who are looking to push the boundaries of lighting design. 

In mid-autumn, when the nights get longer in the northern hemisphere, we encounter numerous light festivals. And indeed, within the last ten years, more and more light festivals have globally emerged. The reason for the success of light festivals is simple, as the German curator Bettina Pelz concludes: “It’s actually fairly easy, because whenever you do something with light in cities in the night, then people do come. If you do it good, they come twice.” 

As Pelz points out, light is an apt medium for evening events, since it easily attracts people. Communities have discovered the potential of lighting for city marketing, and the closer they plan their date to Christmas, the more they merge their illumination with the festive blinking lights of commercial Christmas markets.