how 2 edit City Growth Rate?

is there any way 2 edit the game files and slow down the city growth rate by at Least

.5%
or 1%

maybe even
1.5%

this should help allieviate the problem with citys growing 2 fast

and im sure ALOT of people on the forums would love to know also

we might need a dev guy to answer this...
cant seem to find a single thread addressing this modification

=which file do we edit?
=which lines do we edit? and in what way?

also , just in case

if we pull down the growth rate too low

will citys be having *negative 'growth'?

ex: i bring down base growth rates by 2%
and now all citys at start of game on low tax rates will be
losing 1.5% pop per turn

---->will it just stop at 0%?
---->or does it go to negatives? -1%