Accepted answer: no
My city is 1500 years old. It has 1.8 million citizen, 800k businesses and a small industry (around 9k). It's a thriving town running on a $4.5 million yearly budget. It's pretty developed; the crime and pollution rates are low, education and health are pretty high and it has a decent infrastructure (buses and rails account for 20% of traffic). The city is connected to many other cities, it outsources industrial jobs, electricity, water and garbage. It has an airport that handles over a million traveler.
Here is how it looks like from the sky. It's pretty crowded
And this is only a small part of the whole thing.
But there is a problem here: Technically, and from my estimates, my city can handle up to 3 million citizen and 1.5 million businesses. But it's not. However, it has entered in a chronic recession that no stimulus can escape it. My only escape to the decline of the city is to raise taxes which only worsened things.
Taxes for the poor are at 20%, and 8% for the remaining. Businesses have taxes from 8% to 20%; and the small industry is taxed 8%. When I started the city, the taxes were a lot lower, but since the recession hit (at around 2.0 million population); I had the raise taxes to face the budget deficit.
I have tried lowering taxes for the poor which increases their number, and then convert them to medium and rich citizens. It worked for a while and made something similar to a "business cycle". But this plan no longer works. Lowering taxes to 0% for the poor now barely raises their number (though their number doubles, it's still pretty negligible to the rest of the city population - around 200k -)
I have tried taking all taxes to 0; but this only ruined my thousands' year savings. The city couldn't get alive again. There are dozens (and maybe hundreds) of empty business and residential buildings that could handle a couple more millions of population.
Planning new parts, making projects and things doesn't work; The effect is negligible to the whole. I think the solution is an economical reform but SimCity has poor settings in that area.
How can I bring my city out of this recession?