Rapid urbanization has a tremendous impact on the water cycle, causing hydrological perturbations that are now a major contributor to induced urban stormwater disasters and posing significant planning and management difficulties for sustainable cities. Integrated consideration of the spatial layout of watershed sponges and their functional coupling relationship with the stormwater process is an inevitable solution to the problem of urban stormwater disasters. This paper takes the upper Ting River basin in Changting County as the study area, The SWAT and SCS models were utilized to simulate the rainfall-runoff and stormwater inundation processes, and used the InVSET model to evaluate the suitability of sponge construction. An in-depth study of the coupling relationship between them was conducted to propose an adaptive planning method for sponge cities. The results show that: (1) The SWAT and SCS models constructed in the upper Ting River basin can accurately identify the water yield areas, stormwater catchment corridors and stormwater catchment nodes, and reflect their spatial distribution characteristics. Based on the InVEST model combined with the indicators of stormwater storage, water conservation, soil retention, and water yield to realize the goal of quantitatively portraying the suitability of sponge construction, the integration of stormwater process simulation and the evaluation of the suitability of sponge construction provides a new method for reconstructing the sponge system spatial pattern of the basin. The area of low safety pattern in the central city of Changting county accounts for 37.51% of the total, showing a concentrated distribution along the river, which exposes the central city to a greater risk of stormwater disasters; The suitable area for sponge construction shows an uneven distribution, with the highly suitable area accounting for 7.91% of the total area of the basin, concentrating in the large area of farmland to the north of the central city. In this work, the stormwater process simulation was used to extract the stormwater suitability construction area, which allowed for the reconstruction and optimization of the upper Ting River basin's sponge system's spatial pattern. The spatial overlap of the stormwater security pattern area and sponge construction suitable area only accounts for 18.15% of the study area. In order to effectively mitigate stormwater risks, the sponge ecological area and sponge functional area are also re-demarcated. Differentiated control objectives are set based on the type of land use, and an adaptive planning methodology for sponge cities with structural and functional nesting is developed, serving as a basis for reference for sponge city planning practice.