City Information Modelling (CIM) is becoming an important base model of Smart City and Digital Twin City, which can realise intelligent city design and management. Lately, CIM has become the focuses of urban planning and design studies. Under the influence of building information model (BIM), smart city and three-dimensional city simulation, city-level information modelling, CIM connects different BIM levels integrates the spatial expression effect of GIS. This review introduces CIM development from using generating procedures, such as rules and typological processes, to analyse urban scenarios to form the city full information scene through the integration of BIM, GIS, and IoT. The paper also overviews the technical path of construction with CIM implementation, problems existing in the current practice of CIM technology, including all information of digital and lightweight data, scene fast calls and data standard uniformity, etc. Following the latest CIM progress, the paper puts forward some ways to realise the effective use of CIM in urban planning and design. The further review focuses on big data security, publicity, urban design element and CIM platform practical use in China.