For a number of reasons, natural and human, people have recently evacuated or otherwise abandoned a number of places around the world. 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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Sand blows across the coastal highway near Brega in eastern Libya, on April 1, 2011.

5. 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.

6. 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.

9. 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.

12. A damaged home at dusk in Joplin, Missouri, on August 16, 2011. Residents were still recovering and rebuilding from a devastating tornado that ripped through Joplin, in late May, 2011.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. The abandoned Michigan Central Station in Detroit, Michigan, on April 5, 2011.

16. The interior of the abandoned Martyrs of Uganda Catholic Church, in Detroit, Michigan, on December 18, 2011.

17. 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.

18. 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.?

19. Discarded fencing outside the Olympic indoor pool and the OAKA sports hall in the 2004 Olympic Games Complex in Athens, Greece, on February 18, 2012.

20. 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.