The city could be at risk of repeating the mistakes of the nation's capitals, RMIT researcher Lucy Gunn has warned.

"Ballarat, Bendigo and other similar-sized regional cities are at a tipping point," she said.

"Equitable access to key infrastructure such as public transport, healthy food and community services is better in the central, more established areas. This declines as you move to the edge of the city.

"As we've seen in the capital cities, residents on the urban fringe have less access to these services which can impact their health and wellbeing."

Dr Gunn said her team's research revealed Junortoun, Huntly and Big Hill were among the areas with low liveability scores.

All are on the outskirts of town and have been attracting more people as the city's population surges.

Other high-growth suburbs like Epsom, Ascot, Strathfieldsaye and Maiden Gully ranked lower for liveability.

They were more likely to lack "social infrastructure" like health and education facilities, or places to easily gather for sport or recreation.

Affordable housing in those neighbourhoods was less likely to easily link up with public transport, walking and cycling infrastructure employment or education.

Older, established suburbs ranked better, including Strathdale, Flora Hill, Golden Square and out to Eaglehawk.

Kennington and the suburb of Bendigo ranked highest.

Dr Gunn said a key attraction of cities like Bendigo is that people tend to live closer to where they work.

"Ballarat and Bendigo performed well on this indicator, as well as access to public transport, which our research shows has major health and wellbeing benefits because it allows residents the opportunity to be more active, Dr Gunn said.

"The benefit of looking at these liveability measures separately is you can see where each city is performing well and where improvements can be made."

City of Greater Bendigo Mayor Margaret O'Rourke said she had been really excited to see Bendigo rate highly in RMIT's list of liveable cities.

She acknowledged concerns about urban sprawl in cities like Bendigo's but said the council had been, and continued to, work on long term planning to account for population pressures.

"We have been seeing our population growing organically and on current projections it could rise to 200,000 by 2050," Cr O'Rourke said.

She said an urban growth boundary to stop sprawl was created around Bendigo in 2006 and has so far only been extended once.

"Inside the boundary we have 23 per cent capacity for growth through available land," Cr O'Rourke said.

The council wants to use existing transport corridors to dictate where new suburbs - and the kinds of amenities noted in RMIT's liveability data - should go, she said.

Ultimately, though, Cr O'Rourke suspected that everyone would have their own unique perspective on what made a suburb liveable.

"It all depends on how you define these things, and what is important to each person you ask," she said.

Data from 21 regional Australian cities is now available from the RMIT's Australian Urban Observatory website.