CLEVELAND, Ohio -- What seemed like a long-shot last May is now a reality -- Tower City’s shopping mall is planned to become City Block, a 350,000 square-foot entrepreneurial hub in the heart of downtown.

Bedrock Detroit, Dan Gilbert’s real estate company, bought the mall in 2016. While other parts of the complex were redeveloped into high-end apartments and a casino, the mall stayed.

Bedrock officials are working with Blockland, Cleveland’s grassroots technology movement, to redevelop the mall, adding workspaces for entrepreneurs, tech companies and start-ups. Employees will be in the same building as a transit hub and steps away from downtown’s Public Square.

There will be shopping and dining areas as well as a planned pedestrian walkway which would involve shutting down a segment of W. Prospect St. which cuts between segments of the complex.

Tower City Cinemas, the movie theaters where the Cleveland Film Festival is held each year, will remain untouched.

“The vision is for City Block to soon occupy a substantial portion of The Avenue Shops at Tower City Center, bringing together corporations, technology start-ups, venture capitalists and the broader community in a world class entrepreneurial center for the purpose of moving Cleveland and northeast Ohio to the forefront as a top five relevant technology city,” Bedrock Chairman Jim Ketai wrote in a statement.

The City Block plan will be formally announced at a late afternoon meeting at cleveland.com’s offices on Superior Avenue.

It’s a $110 million commitment and not all the money is raised yet, so Blockland volunteers will need to secure sponsors, equity partners, tenants and — hopefully — a large tech company to anchor the space, founder Bernie Moreno said in a phone interview.

Though the deal is set, the specifics are not. The renovation will be done in phases, but those are not yet defined. There have been conversations with many potential tenants, Moreno says, but none are locked up yet. His own blockchain company, Ownum, will be one of the first to move in.

All of this will need to be figured out in the next four months.

A Cleveland Metropolitan School District school was initially part of the plans for City Block, but is not yet a definitive part of the plan. Officials are having conversations about educational offerings through City Block, but that could mean a school, classes or other programs.

Though other sites were discussed as potential City Block locations, having the offices at the transit hub is one of the key parts of making the project work.

“If you really want technology and entrepreneurship and innovation to touch everybody in the community, you have to make it accessible to everybody,” Moreno said.

Blockland’s mission does not include pushing funding for public transportation, but Moreno hopes the project can help spur additional investment and reinforce its importance.

“Unlike my generation, where the dream was always to have a house in the suburbs, young people today want to live in a densely populated environment. Car ownership is not a priority.”

Also set to be announced is a dramatic reorganization of the Blockland effort. The organization’s membership is stacked with civic leaders, but the group has no official budget and volunteers are working on the initiative on top of full-time jobs.

Blockland will hand off the majority of its “nodes," or focus areas, to the Cleveland Innovation Project, which is funded by the Greater Cleveland Partnership, The Fund For Our Economic Future, The Cleveland Foundation, JumpStart and Team NEO.

The project is designed to find Cleveland’s next “big bet” on innovation, which will be in the technology space. The partnership between Blockland and the Cleveland Innovation Project will cut out overlapping efforts and allow Blockland to focus on City Block, the annual Solutions conference and promoting community engagement around blockchain and technology, Moreno said.

This story has been updated to include information about a proposed school at the City Block site.