Abstract
There is a growing public concern over the high societal costs of the suburban dwelling dream. At the same time, there is a growing despair among spatial planners on how to retrofit suburban dwelling environments to reduce these costs. All their strategies seem to strand in resistance. This article proposes to shift focus; from trying to change suburbia, to trying to steer the suburban dwelling dream. Our main argument is that such shift would require making visible how dwelling cultures interdepend. We will discuss how we relied on patterns to start 'expanding' this interdependency and how the participatory development of a suburban pattern language helps to support this process of expansion.