In a way this is a doomed endeavour (like many I engage in). SF ranges from Industrial Breakdown to Starship Destiny to Starsong to Time Wars: Invasion.
But, if you look at television, many shows, even in radically different futures (which is probably unreasonable to some degree) have many similar elements.
Like dark, wet streets that are poorly lit, and corridors with strange metals and odd protrusions. Most rooms are nearly empty, and poorly decorated.
So what I strive to do is to give you some set-pieces you can drop into many SF futures, and make it a little richer. This also could serve as an arguement for truly seeing beyond the usual SF fare, but this is not teaching you a new cuisine. This is teaching how to add pepper and salt to your dishes.
1. Endless Roadnet Repair: Ocassionally the metropolitan transportation division will tell the long-suffering citizens that 'after a year, this project will be done...'. That might be true, but then they add a lie. "....And then roads will be finished, and traffic will smooth out."
Due to the continuous nature of repair and expansion, the road net of a sufficiently large organization, will never be finished.
So your players should meet up with some construction work (even if they're flying hovercars.)
2. Proliferation of agencies: One can hope this will be turned around, but in America today, there are turkey inspectors who are armed. Most futures have one Space Police. What about a future with a dozen different enforcement agencies whose mandates are occasionally triggered by the same events.
Hero PC stopped an armed robbery with his laser blaster. But he took off afterwards, and the villain is claiming Hero PC was an accomplice (just for spite, or to trade Hero PC for a lighter prison sentence).
Now the Metroplex Police want him, so does the High Energy Agency Tribune (for firing the blaster), the Speciest Insult Control Kontrol (because he called the villain "scum" whic is insulting to pond scum); the Department of Transport because his laser gouged the roadway....and so on and so forth. Some might be almost reasonable, and some would vary in skill.
This could be obviously played for comedy.
More later....