Since the AP is geographucally challenged
The brown areas are the part of the county not inside the city limits.
The pointy area on the Southwest side is South Carolina. There has been a dispute about where the state border is, but Charlotte (the city) does not extend past the border.
Charlotte is subject to the same semantic games as Detroit. The “City of Detroit” is very different than the Detroit metro area. (Mostly) white people will say they live in Detroit, but will quickly point out they don’t live in the “City of Detroit”.
The city population has a population of a bit over 800,000, but the Charlotte Metro area has about 2.3 million people – The metro area includes a lot of people in South Carolina, and extends West to Belmont and Gastonia, and Northeast to Concord and Kannapolis, and North to Huntersville. Some would assert that it extends North to Statesville, NE to Salisbury and West to Kings mountain. That’s more a TV viewing designation than a reality. If you talk to people in Statesville and ask “Are you from Charlotte?” They will be perplexed by the question