Not long ago I had to visit this town in Slovakia, and immediately upon arrival I thought “damn this is City 17”. Fun place though. No striders or anything.
Or almost all of the former USSR up to this day, excluding a few cities here and there. The place I'm living in basically hasn't changed in the last 30-40 years.
might be preferable to modern Los Angeles ?
Different beasts. Eastern Europe was impoverished, the malaise that is hurting the US cities is disorder.
A lot of American urban neighbourhoods are quite impoverished too though. Probably more so than eastern Europe was, for the terrible Soviet architecture was functional, cheap and ugly but not necessarily bad. And eastern Europe didn't have the large divide between rich and poor that the US has.
We had the divide between the nomenklatura and the rest, instead.
For this setting, there is even more depressive game - Belong Nowhere[1]