Abstract. Urban planning is a very complex task, especially considering the many challenges it faces, including an increasing need for housing in response to demographic growth and a need to limit abusive land artificialisation. As part of an interdisciplinary action-research project focused on experimenting with various uses of an existing City Information Model (CIM) for urban design, we are developing a new indicator to characterize urban intensity and a method to quantify it through the City Information Model (CIM) of a French eco-district. Our project is ongoing, and, in this paper, we present intermediate results on the potential of this CIM to support the automated quantification of our urban intensity indicator. We also describe the solutions currently implemented so that our experimental CIM can provide the necessary information for a more complete and automated urban intensity analysis. Finally, we shed light on key issues regarding the use of CIM, specifically CIM made up of various BIM models (of buildings lots and public spaces) for urban analysis at the district scale during the design phase. These issues include the need to generalize BIM entities and to manage property sets and nomenclatures to allow automation of analyses at the district scale, as long as there is no BIM+ data model allowing for urban analysis.