BALLARAT has been named as one of Australia's most liveable regional cities, with Victoria's three largest centres outside of Melbourne all among the nation's best.
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But growing urban sprawl means it is looking like metropolitan centres as more and more people struggle to access services.
The city ranks top across every regional city in the country in access to public transport and availability of public open space.
It is also ranked number four in social infrastructure, access to supermarkets and local employment opportunities and fifth in housing affordability.
Of the seven key points, the only region where Ballarat ranks poorly is close proximity to alcohol with an average of 1067m to the nearest alcohol retailer.
Interestingly the area of the city considered the most livable around the central and northern regions, has the easiest access to alcohol.
A similar survey released by Ipsos in September last year, ranked Ballarat as Victoria's second best regional city, behind Warrnambool.
The RMIT University study ranked the 21 largest regional cities in the country.
However, it is not publicly releasing the final rankings of the 21 cities.
Geelong and Bendigo also featured highly in the rankings, Geelong particularly so in access to supermarkets and social infrastructure.
Geelong also ranked as the most affordable in terms of housing of the three major centres.
Lead researcher Lucy Gunn from the RMIT Centre for Urban Research said one of the key benefits of living in a regional city is that people tend to live close 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.
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"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."
But Dr Gunn is cautious about whether that will continue into the future.
Ballarat's outer suburbs are quickly resembling those of outer metropolitan areas with limited access to services such as supermarkets and schools.
"Ballarat, Bendigo and other similar-sized regional cities are at a tipping point," she said.
"We can see this clearly in the maps and data that they are starting to look like larger cities.
"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."
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