I think it is important to point out that many statements Gehl made are pertinent to the current redevelopment direction and debate in Vancouver. People should not be caught up in redesigning the city skyline. We should be focussed on the ground plane. Who cares what the downtown buildings look like from a window at City Hall? The buildings, streets and public spaces are for the people who inhabit the buildings and it should be designed for people and their use, function and comfort.
You forgot to mention that Gehl noted that the Landscape Architects were the “heroes” of the design profession who have paid the most attention to the human scale within modern cities.

Gehl also commented:

“Every city I know of has a department of traffic planners. No city in the world has a department for pedestrians.”

I really appreciated his point about the shift from traditional, incremental city-building humans did for hundreds of years to the larger scale stuff that started happening with modernism and how we were lost as to how to do it right because we had never built on that scale before, we had to traditions to tell us how to do it well. So the architects came in and started making stuff up and we’ve been struggling ever since.

re: towers/copenhagen scale. I would suggest that the mid-rise form of the Olympic village is an attempt to explore non-tower, high density forms…. so looks like we’re already thinking about it!