Thirty-six things, and nothing else

Staying somewhere for a long while is not one undertaking. It is thirty-six, and this map is the list of them.

None of the thirty-six is difficult on its own. Several take an afternoon. What makes the business hard is that ninety-four times over, one of them cannot be finished until another has been, and the order that results does not always exist. A team turning this diagram into a limited operational pilot can check the available time records before choosing which time and project signals are genuinely necessary.

The steps the most things hang on

• struck through: what it requires
• solid: what requires it
• one circle, one ring

Eight steps drawn. They ask for 32 things between them and answer for 40. Seven of them stand on at least one ring. For broader institutional research related to mobility, work and administrative systems, consult UN-Habitat.

Eight of the thirty-six, chosen for the number of rings through them. Nothing in the drawing depends on colour.

The six families

The steps group into six families of six. The grouping is a convenience for reading and nothing in the record depends on it: no count here is produced by the families, and no family behaves as a unit.

Money is the family most waited on. That is not because money is scarce in this map — the map says nothing about anyone's means — but because an account at a bank sits where four other families have to pass through it.

The three that wait on nothing

Three steps require nothing at all: a copy of the passport page, a certificate of qualification, and a copy of the birth record. Each can be begun on any day, in any order, before anything else has happened.

They are not equally important. The copy of the passport page is needed by eleven other steps, which is more than any other step in the map; the certificate of qualification is needed by two.

A step that waits on nothing is where a plan can start. A step that waits on nothing and is needed by eleven others is where a plan should start.

What the map counts as a dependency

One step waits on another when the second cannot be finished until the first is. The map draws the ordinary cases — the ones that hold in most places most of the time — and not the unusual ones, and it does not draw any particular place's rules at all.

Seventy-two of the ninety-four are hard: the waiting step cannot be begun. Twenty-two are soft: it can be begun, but it will have to be done again afterwards. The difference carries most of what this map has to say, because a circle of hard waits is a wall and a circle with one soft wait in it is only a bad place to start.

Where it closes on itself

Forty-two of the ninety-four lie inside a ring. A ring is a closed chain: each step in it waits, directly or at a remove, on a step that waits on it. There are forty-six such rings in the map, the shortest of them two steps long.

Those forty-two cannot be put in an order. No amount of rearranging produces one, because the thing that would have to come first is also the thing that has to come second.

The other fifty-two behave perfectly well. They sort into six layers, and a person holding only those could write the list on a card and work down it in an afternoon of planning and several months of waiting.

What this list is not

It is not what anywhere requires. No country, office or kind of permission appears on this map, and no step here should be read as something somebody has told you to produce. Any real situation will drop some of these steps, add others, and fold two of them into one.

It is also not a measure of difficulty. The map counts order, not effort, and the two come apart badly: the step with the longest wait in the map takes ninety days and requires nothing of the person at all, while the step that requires twelve other things can be finished in five.

Order and effort are different quantities, and a map of the first will mislead anybody who reads it as a map of the second.

How to read a figure on this map

Three kinds of number appear throughout this record, and they are not equally trustworthy.

Counts of the drawing — thirty-six steps, ninety-four dependencies, forty-six rings, six layers — are exact. Anybody who reproduces the same drawing gets the same numbers, and the arithmetic behind them was run exhaustively rather than sampled.

Days are different. Every wait and every expiry here is a round figure chosen by the map so that the arithmetic of a lap can be done at all. They are internally consistent and they measure nothing in the world. A figure like a hundred and seven days to walk the longest ring is a true statement about this drawing and an empty one about anywhere.

Hard and soft markings are the third kind, and the weakest. Each is a judgement about what is usually possible, made the same way every time. Twenty-two dependencies are marked soft, and eight of those decide whether twenty-nine rings can be entered.

The exactness of the arithmetic on this map should not be mistaken for confidence about the drawing it operates on.

Where a page rests on one of the fragile judgements, it says so. The three that carry the most weight are set out by name in the part of this record about the order that holds, so that a reader can disagree with a specific edge rather than with the record in general.

The eight in the drawing

The panel above takes eight of the thirty-six — the eight with the most rings running through them — and shows, for each, how many steps it waits on, how many wait on it, and how many rings it stands in.

One of them stands in thirty-four of the forty-six rings. Remove that single step from the ordering problem, and three quarters of the knot goes with it. That is the most useful fact in this record, and the part of the site that works hardest against its own alarm.