Disclaimer: my experience is limited to Europe
I don't think Europe is a uniform place in that regard. Different European countries have quite different norms.
In my experience the amount of conversations I have with strangers in daily life depends almost entirely on how open I am to be approached be other people. It seems to be hard to fake signal I give out via body language. Unfortunately it comes and goes for periods of a time and it's not easily changeable.
It seems almost like people young enough to be attractive basically make their own special subcultures and average typical places are old people places.
That's probably says more about what you consider a typical place then about how young people want to spend their time.
That said in the age of meetup.com you can simply pick a relevant meetup where people with whom you share an interest congregate.
My experience ranges from Scotland to Ukraine, Denmark to Italy and frankly haven't seen a huge difference. You see, modern culture became incredibly uniform. Global trends from TV made sure pretty much everywhere people are drinking the same drinks, listening to the same music, wearing the same clothes. I actually find it boring and no longer travel to cities when I am travelling for pleasure, not business, because today the only real difference between say Amsterdam and Rome is pretty old buildings. But otherwise people became "global people" ...
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