Outdoor advertising in Niš

Advertising faces in the catalogue: 3. Addresses under them: 3. Owners: 2. Every face comes with an exact address, plus a photo and a rate-card price where the owner has published them, and we check the availability of the addresses you pick with the structure owners.

Formats in the catalogue: 2. Most faces belong to Building wraps: 2.

No city list of permitted types and sizes appears here: the full text of the Niš advertising decision (Official Journal of the City of Niš, no. 63/2019) has never been published in open access. The national Advertising Act names the media for open surfaces as the advertising panel or billboard, the poster, the display and illuminated signs. Which type a given site allows is for the city administration to say, and we ask them while shortlisting.

The entire retail axis of the centre is a protected spatial cultural-historical entity, entered in the register of immovable cultural property on 4 December 1993 under the number ПКИЦ 31. The register spells out the streets it covers:

• Obrenovićeva;
• Nade Tomić;
• Nikole Pašića;
• Svetozara Markovića;
• Drvarska;
• Milorada Veljkovića-Špaje;
• Trg kralja Milana Obrenovića.

The heritage institute sets out the procedure itself: before any works on protected property it issues the conditions for technical protection measures, after which the investor produces project documentation and obtains consent; without both, works are stopped and the original state is restored at the expense of the investor. The word "advertising" does not appear in that text, which speaks of works, so we clear an address inside it with the institute in advance. The Niš institute handles the entity and the fortress; Ćele kula, Bubanj, Čegar and Bresje-Medijana are handled by the Republic Institute in Belgrade.

The permit comes from the city, not from a city municipality: art. 85 of the charter, which lists municipal tasks, does not mention advertising at all. The city construction administration says in its own informator that it issues permits under the city advertising decision (Official Journal of the City of Niš, no. 63/2019), and receives applicants at its permit centre on Nikole Pašića 22. The same body decides separately on occupying public land, under the communal-order act.

Those requisites come from the 2021 informator: the city journal is not archived online and the regulation base does not respond. We request the zone, the rate and the dimensions for an address from the city administration.

Serbian law prescribes no language for an advertising message at all, so a creative on a board in Niš may be in one language. The Act on the Official Use of Languages and Scripts applies, by its art. 2, to state bodies, the bodies of cities and municipalities, to organisations exercising public powers and to public enterprises — a private advertiser buying a surface from an operator falls outside that scope.

The one language duty is the name board: under art. 20 of the same act the business name of a legal entity is written in Serbian and in the minority language in official use where the entity is seated, while the part of the name used as a trademark is exempt from translation.

Public transport in Niš is buses and nothing else: the sole authorised organiser of passenger transport lists urban, suburban, special and night bus categories, and the city runs no urban rail.

• there are fourteen city lines: 1 to 13 plus the airport line 34, which links the aerodrome with the bus station and the railway station;
• Konstantin Veliki airport (LYNI) is one of only two aerodromes in Serbia certified by the Civil Aviation Directorate; it stands inside the city on Vazduhoplovaca street, and its new passenger terminal opened on 23 July 2024;
• motorway A4 towards the Bulgarian border begins in Niš and parts from the A1 at the Trupale interchange, so transit traffic here is not bounded by the population of the city.