This urban history is built from the analysis of the processes that reflected the technification and modernization of the city during the first half of the 20th century, configured from the transformation of the thinking of the elites, the introduction of foreign technical advances and the construction of new infrastructures that reflected the ideal that contemporaries associated with progress. This process of urban modernization exemplified in the case of the city of Manizales, brought together the hygienic, urban, stylistic and technical measures that sought to turn the city into a stage for the representation of the advances of the time. It responds to the establishment of a new order and a new power that, during this period, can be differentiated from three aspects: the city seen as a prototype that establishes a system of administration and financing in which the moralizing ideology of the elite determined the correct way of occupying and living space; the city extended as a network of connections and disconnections where public works acted as tools for ordering and social control; and, the city as an artifact in which the scientific knowledge of foreign professionals was articulated and the construction of avant-garde infrastructure, implementing scenarios related to new urban functions. In this way, the illuminated city exposes the universal idea of the city that, in the first half of the 20th century, exalted the incorporation of technology as a reflection of modernity and progress and imposed a cultural transformation oriented towards the adoption of habits that sought to convert the inhabitants in civilized citizens.