On first glance, early ideas for Pittsburgh’s “Uptown EcoInnovation District” look like urban planning potpourri — a number of strategies that aim to strengthen the city’s Uptown neighborhood, with goals attached to transit, housing, entrepreneurship, community cohesion and more.

That ambitious, holistic, big-picture planning is just the right type of strategy for the low-density, underutilized neighborhood, according to Grant Ervin, city sustainability manager. Portland-based nonprofit EcoDistricts chose Uptown — sandwiched between Pennsylvania’s second- and third-largest downtowns, Pittsburgh and Oakland — to be one of eight 2014 EcoDistrict incubator neighborhoods in the U.S. The sustainable cities advocacy organization will consult on the project moving forward.

“For the past generation, there have been conversations about how to better connect these two neighborhoods through transit that have gone through fits and starts,” says Ervin. “What we recognized, however, was that there was never a conversation about the neighborhood itself.

“It’s largely been a place that’s been forgotten, whether it’s by City Hall or by residents from around the city. It’s never been a focus of the conversation. What we saw was an opportunity to kind of change that dialogue.”

Local anchor institutions like Duquesne University and UPMC Mercy Hospital take up a lot of territory in the neighborhood, which only has about 800 residents. Surface parking lots that service these institutions and other businesses take advantage of the flat planes of the neighborhood, rare for the hilly city. Ervin suggests that these spaces might be better suited to affordable workforce and student housing.

EcoInnovation District plans for Uptown include adding bus rapid transit, creating a master plan for infrastructure upgrades, enhancing a budding high-tech entrepreneurial campus and increasing bike access — all with an equitable development model in mind.

“Finding development opportunities centered around transportation accessibility, whether it is walking, biking or transit, feels really critical,” says Ervin. “Providing for price points all along the [income] continuum is going to be a key factor that the plan we will be developing.”

Uptown is already benefiting from two other “overlays” that Ervin says will be strengthened by the EcoInnovation District designation. It is part of the Downtown Pittsburgh 2030 District overlay, designed to create and retrofit high-performance buildings by 2030. And it is also part of the Pittsburgh Central Keystone Innovation Zone, a project of entrepreneurship-focused Urban Innovation21 that’s providing tax incentives, business resources, and educational and internship programs to support the city’s startup community. Twenty of the 45 existing Keystone Innovation Zone companies are located in Uptown, according to Urban Innovation21’s William Generett Jr.

“We’ve been able to turn a corner in terms of [attracting high-risk entrepreneurs], but our challenge going forward is making sure we are including more people in the economic transformation,” says Generett. “Fortunately we’ve been working on it for a while, so we’re aligned to really do some big and catalytic things as it relates to inclusion, but it’s not easy work and it’s going to take a lot of time and patience and may take decades.”

In other words, no one zone designation or project is going to do the trick, but several recent Pittsburgh efforts manage to blend goals of inclusion, sustainability and economic development.

A new $12 million dollar transitional housing project in Uptown is a model of energy efficiency. And a former trade school was converted into an Energy Innovation Center, a collaboration among local universities that offer training in green technology fields to their students and also to local underserved residents.

“Part of the thing we’re starting to see [across the county] is this engagement around civic technologies,” says Ervin, mentioning another opportunity. “In developing the neighborhood planning process, we see that as a key opportunity where local residents can have an opportunity to test their wherewithal in terms of the design and development of technology as well as the application.”

Generett suggests that although all of these district designations have their limitations, they are still a demonstration of commitment: “True inclusion is really, really difficult. You go across the country and see these communities that are transformed — I don’t care whether it’s through an innovation zone or corridors, there are a lot of different names — but the elephant in the room, the challenge is how are we defining community? … What’s good about the EcoDistrict is that although there’s just been a lot of activity in Uptown and in the Hill District, what is really going to inform what happens there is how residents of the community see themselves being engaged.”