Grey vs Green Infrastructure

Gauteng’s grey infrastructure is easily identifiable in built up urban areas where it commonly performs a single function in the landscape (e.g. storm water infrastructure that attenuates heavy rainfall events and floods). Grey infrastructure requires large investments and continuous management to ensure it provides quality services for the Gauteng community. Green infrastructure, on the other hand, is a multi-functional network that provides more sustainable alternatives to grey engineering and provides similar services to some of the current grey infrastructure in Gauteng. This map demonstrates Gauteng’s rich and diverse green infrastructure network which has the potential to provide alternative green services in the future. It was created using GTI 2.5m (2010) land cover data derived from GeoTerraImage (GTI). The source data was reclassified into its urban and green components and represented in two different data frames: a grey infrastructure frame depicting the urban componanents, and in contrast, a green infrastructure frame with the green components displayed.