Key recommendations from the panel include:  

• Make downtown and the Gateway Mall the city’s Central Social District. Position culture, creativity and joy as key drivers of economic competitiveness.  
• Dig into the past to plant the future. Honor the long history of Black and brown innovators and culture-makers who have created value and joy in the district (and St. Louis more broadly). Integrate meaningful storytelling and placemaking that references history—while creating fertile ground for future innovation.  
• Generate a virtuous cycle of activation – amenity – anchor. Implement a foundational strategy for weak market locations. Start with intentional temporary but consistent activations — such as musical events, test kitchens, and pop-up retail — that offer welcome amenities to residents and visitors. Foster these amenities into becoming strong, recognizable anchors for attracting and retaining residents, visitors, and businesses.  
• Build and nurture a “reef” for social connection. Invest in a nurturing, supportive environment for civic life and social infrastructure. Identify specific locations within downtown that serve as nodes and attractors of civic life. Subsidize rents, improvements, and operations for key tenants.  
• Invest in market–makers. Create market demand that doesn’t exist today. Offer products, services, and experiences to consumers that they didn’t know they wanted. Rather than relying on outside investments or franchises, grow promising existing entrepreneurs, creatives, and civic organizations.  
• Invest in community capacity-building. Channel resources and power to organizations and individuals in communities who will be strong allies and activators for downtown. Grow capacity for entrepreneurs and culture-makers already embedded in neighborhoods — focusing on BIPOC leaders — who will be key tenants and attractors in the downtown core.  
• Celebrate and communicate distinctive areas of strength. Use marketing and messaging vehicles to foreground diversity as a competitive advantage for downtown. Center narratives of BIPOC innovators and culture-makers in communication strategy, positioning downtown as a place where Black and brown communities thrive.  
• Choreograph the urban experience through a strong district manager.  Consolidate governance and stewardship into an empowered curatorial position. Establish a strong steward for the district with the resources and responsibility for managing both the public realm and the private sector tenant mix. Make space for a broadly representative cohort of diverse leaders.  
• Create and capture value by controlling more of the environment. Make strategic real estate acquisitions in an underpriced market. Hold and activate real estate for value creation and value capture. Define nodes and corridors for concentrated public-sector real estate investment.