For a number of reasons, natural and human, people have recently evacuated or otherwise abandoned a number of places around the world -- large and small, old and new. Gathering images of deserted areas into a single photo essay, one can get a sense of what the world might look like if humans were to vanish from the planet altogether. Collected here are recent scenes from nuclear-exclusion zones, blighted urban neighborhoods, towns where residents left to escape violence, unsold developments built during the real estate boom, ghost towns, and more.
A tree grows from the top of a chimney in an abandoned factory yard in Luque, on the outskirts of Asuncion, Paraguay, on October 2 , 2011.
(AP Photo/Jorge Saenz)
A bust of Confucius rests at an abandoned workshop in the town of Dangcheng in Quyang county, 240 km (150 miles) southwest of Beijing, on December 7, 2011.
Ivy grows over a street in Tomioka town, Fukushima, northeastern Japan, on August 19, 2011. Vines creep across Tomioka's empty streets, its prim gardens overgrown with waist-high weeds and meadow flowers. Dead cows rot where they were left to starve in their pens. Chicken coops writhe with maggots, a sickening stench hanging in the air in this nuclear no-man's land poisoned by radiation from a disaster-battered power plant.
(AP Photo/Hiro Komae)
Sand blows across the coastal highway near Brega in eastern Libya, on April 1, 2011.
Cnoc An Iuir, an empty and unsold housing development, is pictured in the village of Drumshanbo, County Leitrim, Ireland, on January 28, 2012. During the economic boom, Irish developers attempted to cash in, building tens of thousands of houses. However, poor planning decisions and the global recession have resulted in a large number of estates being abandoned, unoccupied or unfinished.
The abandoned conference hall inside the Benghazi Cathedral, in the Libyan rebels' stronghold city of Benghazi, photographed on June 5, 2011. Benghazi Cathedral, designed by Italian architects Guido Ottavo and Cabiati Ferrazza, was built between 1929 and 1939, and was one of the largest churches in North Africa. The building was later used as a headquarters for the Arab Socialist Union, finally becoming vacant and derelict. As of 2009, the cathedral and its entire site have been under renovation by an Italian company.
(Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images)
A goat walks through a deserted school classroom in the village of Voynitsa, some 100 kms (60 miles) north of the capital Sofia, at the heart of Bulgaria's northwestern region, on December 6, 2011. The bare fields, the empty roads, the ruined houses and the shuttered schools say it all. Welcome to Bulgaria's rural northwest, officially the poorest region in the European Union. In the 1970s and 1980s, the region saw massive industrialization, making goods solely for the communist-era Comecon market. But when the Iron Curtain fell 20 years ago, the factories closed.
(Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images)
A neighborhood of mostly empty houses in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on December 21, 2011. Tens of thousands of people have abandoned Ciudad Juarez, a city wrecked by Mexico's drug violence. Although official figures vary, the city this month likely surpassed 10,000 homicides in the past four years.
(Reuters/Jose Luis Gonzalez)
Swings hang in tall grass at a playground in Scenic, South Dakota, on October 6, 2011. The city's school closed down in the late 1990s, when the area ran out of school-aged children to teach. The city was recently sold by ailing owner Twila Merril to Iglesia ni Cristo, a Filipino church whose intentions are a complete mystery to area residents.
(AP Photo/Amber Hunt)
Fiberglass dinosaurs and swans at the abandoned amusement park Spreepark in Berlin, on July 16, 2011. Berlin is littered with relics of its communist past, and one of the eeriest is the Spreepark, where the remains of what was once East Germany's only amusement park still stand.
Apartment blocks in Sesena in the Toledo Provence near Madrid, Spain, seen on February 9, 2012. Only a 45-minute drive from downtown Madrid, towering vacant apartment blocks loom over empty streets and weed-filled lots. Apartments galore are for sale and rent, and prices are plunging. More than 13,000 apartments were supposed to go up here to create a mini-city for 30,000 people. But only 5,100 were built, many are uninhabited and most commercial storefronts in the mega-development are bricked shut. Spain's phenomenal real estate crash and economic implosion has turned what was supposed to become a vibrant suburban paradise for young Spanish couples and their children into one of the most visible monuments of the country's real estate boom gone bust.
(AP Photo/Paul White)
Unused flagposts stand in front of a litter-strewn water feature in the 2004 Olympic Games Complex in Athens, Greece, on February 18, 2012. In 2004 the Olympics returned to Greece, the birthplace of the ancient and modern Olympic Games, however the legacy of the Games has been called into question with many facilities falling into disrepair less than 8 years after they were held.
(Oli Scarff/Getty Images)
A hallway in the empty Pennhurst State Hospital in Spring City, Pennsylvania, on September 15, 2010. Since the last residents left more than 20 years ago, Pennhurst State Hospital sat vacant, its sprawling complex of buildings crumbling, overcome by brush in the suburban Philadelphia countryside.
(AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
A long-abandoned farmhouse sits in open fields near Osoyoos, British Columbia, on September 24, 2011. British Columbia has one of the largest collection of ghost towns or derelict communities in the country. Many are past mining dreams that harvested copper, silver and gold and are either gone without a trace or lie in ruins ravaged by time.
The Jamesburg Earth Station, in Cachagua Valley, near Carmel, California, on February 23, 2012. The earth station, which helped bring Apollo 11's first images from the moon, was an important link for the nation's television, telephone and military networks from 1968 to 2002. Current owner Jeff Bullis, a Silicon Valley businessman, is selling the 97-foot satellite receiver and a 21,718 square foot bunker-like support building on 161 acres of land for close to $3 million. More about the station from the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal here.
The site of the demolished Frontier casino sits vacant on the Las Vegas Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada, on December 2, 2011. Across this hardest-hit Western state, a battle of perceptions is being waged over whether Nevada is on the edge of economic recovery, or still falling four years after the collapse of its mighty housing, tourism and construction industries.
(AP Photo/Isaac Brekken)
The old detective's offices in the Memphis, Tennessee police station, on November 30, 2011. Police officials say their headquarters is overcrowded, but a plan to renovate older quarters is stalled. The old city police station has sat vacant for 30 years.
(AP Photo/The Commercial Appeal, Alan Spearman)
A home is covered with sand on Atafona beach in Atafona, about 225 miles (360 kilometers) north of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on November 11, 2010. The town of Atafona is disappearing. Located in a delta in the state of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, this small town of sand is being swallowed by the ocean as rising temperatures speed up the process of erosion. According to researchers, a total of 183 buildings have been destroyed and the Marine lighthouse moved twice in the past 30 years.
An abandoned colonial mansion is surrounded by trees in McCluskieganj, India, about 40 miles northwest of Ranchi on October 24, 2011. Nearly 80 years ago, Ernest McCluskie, an Indian of Scottish descent established McCluskieganj in what is now the eastern state of Jharkhand, hoping to attract Anglo-Indians anxious about the impending demise of the British empire. Today, the few colonial bungalows still standing are in disrepair, the local economy survives on the back of a single school, and McCluskieganj's aging residents say the "chhotta England" (little England) they grew up in has vanished forever.
(Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images)
The abandoned construction site of the "New Benghazi" project in Benghazi. Libya, on June 14, 2011. Hundreds of cement mixers, cranes, and forklifts stood silent on a massive construction site among gray buildings left unfinished when Chinese workers abandoned Libya as fighting flared.
(Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images)
A cat sits in a deserted street in Peleas de Abajo, in northwestern Spain, on March 8, 2012. Decades of overspending and accumulated interest on unpaid debt has put Peleas de Abajo 4.6 million euros ($6 million) in the red and the mayor claims it is now the most indebted town in Spain. The town's debt per inhabitant is nearly 20,000 euros for every resident.