The development of urban night lighting is inseparable from the rational application of science and technology. Nowadays, these technologies are concentrated in light source technology for low-carbon life, control technology supported by Internet of Things technology, and so on. However, people often evaluate urban night lighting by the criteria of "good" or "bad", "beautiful" or "not beautiful", which are culture rather than technology. It can be seen that urban night lighting itself is not only technical, but technical and cultural. In other words, urban night lighting is a clever and reasonable combination of technology and culture (or art).
In today's increasingly open degree, less and less restrictions on the spread of new technologies, and easier to apply, not all urban night lighting is satisfactory. The root cause is the lack of culture in urban night lighting. The three basic missions of the city are: to store culture, to spread culture, and to create culture. Therefore, when the urban night lighting lacks culture, it will certainly not be satisfactory.
Every country and every city has its own unique cultural heritage. Cultural inheritance is expressed as the basic spirit of local culture, that is, the subtlest internal motives and ideological foundations of cultural phenomena, which are often highly summarized as abstract basic ideas and concepts.
The cultural expression of urban night lighting is that in the lighting activities, we consciously understand, digest and reflect the basic spirit of the local culture, and consciously make the lighting activities one of the activities of storing, disseminating and creating culture. Based on this, we put forward the concept of "urban cultural lighting", requiring urban night lighting not only to illuminate objects and environments with lights, but also to make lights and lamps meet the requirements of the local basic cultural spirit in terms of structure, color, shape, brightness, etc., and consciously reflect it.