Published on January 18, 2026 by Rodrigo Barbosa
2055, lighting design: a white paper to reimagine urban nightscapes
Urban lighting professionals can now delve into a compelling new forward-looking resource from France’s Association des Concepteurs Lumière et Éclairagistes (ACE – Lighting designers and engineers’ association): the bilingual white paper “2055, lighting design”, published in November 2025 for the association’s 30th anniversary.
This publication explores how lighting design might evolve and invites cities and professionals worldwide to imagine their future nocturnal landscapes.
“2055, lighting design” positions itself as a realistic yet ideal exploration of how the profession could change between now and 2055, sixty years after ACE’s creation. The foreword revisits the emergence of light urbanism and lighting master plans in the late 1980s and 1990s, then fast-forwards to current concerns such as light pollution, biodiversity, energy sobriety and inclusive night-time policies.
The white paper is the result of a Think Tank created in April 2024 at the instigation of Roger Narboni, gathering nine ACE lighting designers to carry out conceptual monitoring on future shifts in urban and interior lighting, both by day and by night. Working with time horizons of 5, 10, 20 and 30 years, the group used scenarios to extrapolate “probable nocturnal futures”. These scenarios were used to identify how the profession should evolve in response to environmental, social, technological and urban transformations.