Margaret Mead once remarked that perhaps the goal of anthropolgy should not just be the observation of existing cultures, but should be concerned about designing new ones. This may seem rather arrogant, but it is by no means a new idea. Institutions delight in creating new cultures, designed specifically to meet their needs. The military is a prime example. So are any number of religions. The efforts of political ideologies and corporate collectives to create cultures more amenable to their control are also quite notorious (and usually dismal failures). And it is easy to visualize environments where it may simply be impractical to transplant the "mother culture" intact. Circumstances will always change it, so why not do it consciously and deliberately instead of leaving it to blind chance and natural selection? Whether or not we actually have the wisdom to do this is certainly an open question, but circumstances may make it imperative.

This is an interesting idea, but it falls afoul of the same basic flaw as "designer organisms." Unless you are dealing with a very specific niche, the mechanism of natural evolution tends to field a more workable solution to unknown circumstances. It's why a natural forest is a more robust organism under stress than a cornfield is, and why a culture that is "looser" and has a lot of potential for variety is likely to respond to new conditions better than a culture that has a monolithic and controlled structure.

Usually what happens in history is that, for lack of better options, most colonies have planted "mother cultures" in new lands. Cultural evolution then quickly takes over, and some generations later, you've got something new. The beauty of cultural evolution is that it's a hell of a lot faster than biological evolution, and it's why Earth is up to its ass in humans. Inuit, Polynesians, Europeans, Arabs, Central Africans, Chinese, and all the rest sprang from the same roots, and figured out amazing ways of dealing with their environments on the fly.

Not that there isn't room for "niche" organisms in the world. The new bacteria designed to make ethanol out of garbage may save our butts. Cornfields do a pretty good job at generating food if they're protected from too much change. Heck, making a human that could breath underwater has possibilities.

But I don't think human culture would work well this way. As you point out, attempts to construct idealized utopias have not done well as a rule. The beauty of the government founded in America is that it assumed humans would be jerks who wouldn't line up in neat rows, and tried to work with that.