Building highway landscapes: innovative directions for urban wastewater treatment in the face of new challenges in China

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. The designed project in this paper consists of retention facilities, ecotype corridors, surface flow wetlands and stabilization ponds. Especially, it is designed beside a highway around the city. Normally, the whole system could treat effluents from wastewater plants and irrigation fields. In rainy seasons, it could store and treat extra urban sewer discharges and road surface runoff. During farming season, it is also designed that the outflow of the system would be reused to irrigate. Moreover, this proposal illustrated that the landscape design of the system on a highway side could achieve multiple benefits for the highway surrounding environment. It would provide as much education, recreation, and habitat creation as possible to local community.