A World Without People

[DJU9]

A World Without People


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.



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[DJU9]

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. ​

 

[DJU9]

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.​

 

[DJU9]

Ivy grows over a street in Tomioka town, ***ushima, 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.​

 

[DJU9]

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

 

[DJU9]

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. ​

 

[DJU9]

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. ​

 

[DJU9]

An arch that formerly read "The Alamo", at the entrance to the former U.S. soldiers living quarters at Camp Adder, near Nasiriyah, Iraq, on December 3, 2011.
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[DJU9]

Smashed windows and abandoned satellite dishes pepper a facade of one of the blocks of the derelict Heygate estate in South London, on November 29, 2011.
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[DJU9]

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.​

 

[DJU9]

A view of the abandoned city of Prypiat near the failed Chernobyl nuclear power plant, on April 15, 2011. ​

 

[DJU9]

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. ​

 

[tharo]

ado pattta banzzz!!

 

[DJU9]

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.​

 

[DJU9]

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.​

 

[DJU9]

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.
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[Razor338]

maxxa machnz

 

[DJU9]

The abandoned Michigan Central Station in Detroit, Michigan, on April 5, 2011.
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[Death Heart]

ela

 

[Shelphy]

Nice COllection . Thank you for sharing