Sumner Swaner

Biography

Sumner worked as a wildlife and fisheries biologist for the State of Utah in the 1970s until he discovered Utah State’s Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning and decided to get his BLA. He has since created his own design firm, Swaner Design, has served on the Utah Open Lands Board and the Utah Department of Commerce Landscape Architects, and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. In 2002, Sumner was asked to speak at the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development.

In 2003, he established the Swaner Green Space Institute, along with the Sumner M. Swaner Endowment Professorship, within the LAEP Department. The institute and professorship served to expand the methods, knowledge and application of green space principles in community design. Through 2011 the Swaner Professorship focused upon research in green space concepts as developed through projects in the Intermountain West. Today that research has evolved into a broad array of planning and design studies relating to sustainable development in the 21st century, with the work of Dr. Carlos Licon forging a new era of critical lands research.

Sumner created the Center for Green Space Design, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of open space. Through this institution, he conducts community development meetings to help a community define “open space” in their own terms by using the “CEDAR” method, which encompasses cultural, ecological, developmental, agricultural and recreational elements of the landscape.

Sumner loves spending his spare time with his two children, Pamela and Sumner, and he also enjoys skiing, golfing, backpacking, hiking and hunting.