Urban development in China has caused many problems of urban water management. Today we have to face new challenges about decreasing water resources, wastewater treatment, limited spaces and ecological preservation. Solving these problems should be in sustainable ways with innovative approaches. This paper proposed a highway landscape strategy that contains four major green directions for urban water management. The strategy combined several disciplines of ecology, civil engineering, landscape design and agricultural irrigation. This conceptual idea is demonstrated through a design of a complex constructed wetland system for Huai’an city wastewater plant in Jiangsu province, which sits on the East-route Water Transfer Project of China.

In 2010, according to the report of 2011 from National Bureau of Statistics of China, the people in cities have increased about 13.5% compared with the year of 2000. Urban expanding in China is becoming an inevitable trend. Nearly all of cities are facing water and wastewater management challenges. Improving urban water quality in low-cost and low carbon ways will be critical in moving towards a sustainable future. Constructed wetlands have been used worldwide to improve water quality for domestic reuse, irrigation and environmental protection [1]. These systems are most often designed by engineers who focus primarily on treatment function rather than landscape design, so the potential value of beautiful landscapes will be neglected. Meanwhile, these systems will occupy lots of limited spaces in cities and the land value in use is not efficient.